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Travel, Death and the End

How you get around Blacklight: graves and death, teleporters, home scrolls, the spawn screen, the combat tag and the opening of the End.

When you die

Death here does not scatter your things across the floor. When you die, the plugin lifts your entire drop list and your total experience out of the death event and stores both in a grave placed where you fell. Both are cleared from you in the same moment, which is what keeps a second death event from duplicating your experience.

Two situations you are likely to meet skip the grave, and in both of them your items drop the vanilla way:

• You are in Creative or Spectator mode.
• You die inside a protected region that is not yours. If you are an owner or a member of every region that applies at that spot, it counts as yours and you do get a grave, so dying at your own base is safe.

You can hold three live graves at once. A fourth death is not refused a grave: instead your oldest grave expires immediately and its contents drop on the ground where it stood. If you keep dying without collecting, the oldest pile is the one that goes.

Nothing about dying touches your wallet, your bank accounts, your savings or your loans, and it transfers no ownership: claims, hired NPCs and company shares are all unaffected. The grave system is free at every step, so creating a grave, listing your graves, travelling to one and opening it all cost nothing.

Finding and opening a grave

A grave is a block placed at the spot where you died, with a floating marker above it. The marker's height is corrected for Bedrock, because display and armour stand offsets do not line up between Java and Geyser clients; the grave visuals already account for that, so the label sits in the right place whichever client you play on.

/grave, short form /grv, lists your graves, teleports you to one and removes one. There is no interface screen for it: the list arrives in chat. The teleport runs a short warmup and cancels if you move during it, so stand still while it counts.

Opening a grave hands your items and your experience back through a recovery screen. Reopening the same grave cannot restore a second time.

Graves survive restarts. Each record stores the owner, the location, the contents and an expiry timestamp, and the expiry tasks are rebuilt when the server loads. Because the expiry is a fixed point in time rather than a countdown that is paused, a restart does not buy you extra minutes.

Faction access and the death notification are server-wide settings, not per grave choices, so you cannot open one grave to your faction and keep the next one private.

The combat tag: one rule, not four

Being in combat means exactly one thing on this server: you took damage within the last 5 seconds. Every surface that refuses to work "in combat" reads that same window instead of deciding for itself what a fight is.

The tag lands on the player who was hit, whoever hit them, another player or a mob. Purely environmental damage, such as falling, lava or drowning, does not raise it. If your faction has friendly fire switched off, punching a faction mate deals no damage and raises no tag on either of you. That was fixed on purpose: while the zero damage punch still tagged people, one member could keep an entire faction permanently out of every teleport by tapping them.

Internally there are two clocks, both 5 seconds long: the general faction service tag that nearly everything reads, and a private copy inside the teleporter service that reads the last damage time from the player cache. They describe the same window. The split is an implementation detail rather than a second rule, and one of the reasons a denied heal cancels the interaction outright is that a refusal which eats your item is not an honest refusal.

Getting home: /faction home and the Home Scroll

/faction home returns you to your faction's home. It runs a channel of about 3 seconds with a boss bar counting it down, and the channel has two ways to fail: you move to a different block, or you take combat damage. Turning your head does not fail it, because the movement check compares block coordinates before it looks at anything else.

The Home Scroll is the same teleport in item form, built on the Ender Pearl model. It sells in /shop for 10,000 coins before faction tax, and the receipt shows you the tax inclusive total. The scroll validates before it is spent and is consumed only when the teleport actually completes, so a channel broken by movement or by a hit costs you nothing.

Both paths need a faction and a faction home that someone has set. Neither works while the combat tag is up, and a scroll used while tagged is refused rather than eaten.

The difference between them is the cooldown. The command carries one, and the purchasable Home Recall faction buff exists to shorten it. The scroll ignores the cooldown, because each scroll is its own limiter: you can teleport as often as you can afford to.

A restart in the middle of a channel is safe. The faction home teleport makes no economy call at all, and the scroll's consume step runs only after a completed teleport, so a shutdown mid channel takes neither coins nor scroll from you. The boss bar simply disappears.

The spawn screen, the return countdown and /tpc

When you rejoin, you land on the spawn screen location rather than where you logged out. What happens next depends on whether the server holds a stored last location for you.

• If it holds one, a countdown starts and returns you to that spot when it ends. /tpc cancels the countdown and leaves you standing at spawn.
• If it holds none, you stay at spawn. No countdown runs and no /tpc prompt appears, because there is nowhere to be returned to.

That second case used to behave badly. Finding no stored location, the old code snapshotted wherever you happened to be standing and treated it as a home, which defeated the very check that was meant to suppress the countdown, so everyone saw the prompt including players with no destination. The fabricated location was removed. Typing /tpc when nothing is pending has always been a harmless no operation.

The return teleport cancels if you move during it, the same as the grave teleport does. The countdown length and an optional return delay are server settings, and the spawn screen as a whole has a master switch.

/spawn is a separate command and is not the same thing as the return countdown. It teleports you to spawn straight away, with no channel, provided the combat and PvP rules allow it.

Teleporters

Teleporters are multiblock structures that you build and then register. Their identity is the coordinates of their footprint: nothing is written onto the blocks themselves, and the plugin resolves a structure by scanning that footprint. This is why they survive restarts with no per block bookkeeping, and also why a teleporter is exactly as durable as its blocks.

The command is /teleporter, with /tp2 and /tele as short forms. It covers register, link, unlink, demolish, settings, list, info and a management screen. Linking is what turns two registered structures into a route; an unlinked structure has nowhere to send you.

A jump costs 250 coins by default. The owner can change that, and the presets run from 0 to 5,000. The fee has two legs that you pay as one price: a rent share goes to the owner faction's treasury at that faction's tax rate, clamped to the server ceiling, and the remainder is destroyed as a money sink. Both legs are funded from a single reservation, so a jump you cannot fully afford is refused outright instead of charging you half of it.

The charge is taken when the warmup starts and refunded if the jump is cancelled. A teleporter can be set to faction only, in which case it checks your faction before it moves you.

Registering a structure places no sign and no floating label. The structure block is the surface you interact with, and the name lives in the management screen.

Breaking a teleporter removes its record through a single teardown path, so blocks and records do not drift apart. An explosion catching a structure that straddles a claim boundary is handled as one object: once any block of it is protected, the whole structure is, which stops half a teleporter surviving with its record already deleted.

The End is opened, not assumed open

The End is not treated as a dimension that is simply there. It ships locked, the lock is a persisted server setting, and while it is on, portal access to the End is blocked outright.

Opening it is an announced event rather than a quiet configuration change. When staff unlock the End, every player online receives a title and a subtitle. Both lines are configured in advance, so the announcement is written before the event fires rather than improvised in the moment.

Because the locked state is persisted rather than held in memory, it survives restarts and reloads in both directions: a closed End does not drift open across a restart, and an opened End stays open.

There is no player command for checking the lock. The status command belongs to staff. If your portal refuses to take you, the End is still closed and you are not doing anything wrong.

Terrain, view distance and pre-generation

The chunk manager watches the server tick rate and where players are moving, and it does two things you can feel while exploring.

The first is pre-generation around players. Chunks within a radius of you are generated ahead of time, so walking or flying into new land reads terrain that already exists instead of building it under your feet. The second is view distance. Under load the server drops to a reduced view distance and restores the normal one when the tick rate recovers, which trades a shorter horizon for a steady one.

Both share a ceiling of 300 chunk loads per minute, and that budget covers the reactive pre-generation and any bulk sweep at the same time. When the ceiling is reached the chunk is dropped rather than queued, because queueing under a ceiling turns one busy minute into a backlog that replays forever.

Staff can also run a bulk pre-generation sweep, with a radius given in chunks and capped at 256. The numbers at that maximum are worth knowing, because they explain why some parts of the map feel smooth and others do not.

Generation runs off the main thread, which is what lets a sweep of that size happen while people are playing. What it means for you is simple: inside a pre-generated area the ground is already on disk and exploring it is a read. Outside it, your movement is what pays for the generation, and that is why the first crossing into fresh land is always the slowest one.