SableCraft Standards — the essentials, done properly

Do you have Standards?

Every server command you end up needing, and an economy other mods can drive. /fly, /god, /home, /warp, /tpa, /back, /top, /kit, /vanish, /invsee, mail, mutes, bans — the set every server installs something for, built once and built to be used by other mods rather than merely alongside them.

Your players do not need to install anything. Every command works for an unmodified client off the Mojang launcher: no client mod, no resource pack, nothing to download. The networking channel exists and is deliberately empty.

Yet another essentials mod?

Yes. That is the joke in the name — see xkcd 927 — but it exists for two specific, fixable complaints:

• FTB Essentials has no /top.
• Both it and EssentialsX make /fly and /god pure toggles, with no explicit on or off.

That second one is not a nitpick. A toggle cannot be driven from a command block, a datapack or another mod's skill: a spell that wants flight on for twenty seconds and off afterwards has to guess, and gets it wrong half the time — grounding the player mid-air. So every switch here takes on / off / toggle, with or without a target:

/fly            /fly on            /fly @a on
/god Steve      /god Steve off

A human typing /fly still gets a toggle. Everything else gets an answer it can rely on. The whole mod follows from taking those two complaints seriously.

A few that are not what you expect

• /top scans, it does not read the heightmap — so it works in the Nether and from inside a cave, and it stops at a bedrock box rather than blaming you for the shape of the world.
• /tpa narrates itself at both ends. With a warmup set, the requester gets a ticking action-bar countdown the moment they are accepted; the acceptor is told when they arrive, or why they did not. Prompts carry clickable [Accept] / [Deny] buttons that work on a vanilla client. The classic bug this fixes: five seconds of nothing observable, so both people re-run the command.
• /back is a stack, not a bookmark. Every teleport pushes an entry; /back <n> reaches further, and /back list shows what is actually on it — with the distance and the command that made each stop. Other mods' teleports are labelled too, without those mods doing anything.
• /vanish genuinely hides you — unpaired from other players' entity trackers, off the tab list, and ignored by mob AI in both directions: nothing new can target you, and anything already hunting you forgets you as you disappear. Not a packet trick. Item pickup is suppressed by default, because an arrow vanishing with nobody standing there gives you away as surely as being seen.
• /pay takes a reason — /pay Steve 500 half of what we dug — carried into the mailbox if they are offline, so a payment made on Tuesday still explains itself on Friday.
• Portable workbenches are denied to everyone by default, operators included. That is the design: a crafting table you can open anywhere is an ability to be granted, not a utility to assume.

The systems underneath

Every string is yours

Everything a player can see lives in config/standards/messages.yml, written on first run. Not vanilla translation keys — a stock client does not carry our lang file and would see raw keys — so this is resolved server-side and works everywhere.

{term.*} keys re-skin vocabulary wholesale: set term.balance to credits and every message that mentions money follows, without editing a hundred lines. & colour codes work throughout, including &#RRGGBB hex.

The welcome message knows who it is greeting. /motd, /rules and /info take {player} (their nickname if they have one), {name}, {rank}, {playtime}, {world}, {online} and {max}:

msg.motd.1: "&7Welcome back, &f{player}&7. You are &f{rank}&7."
msg.motd.2: "&7{online} of {max} online. You have played for {playtime}."

A placeholder that does not exist is reported in the server log rather than shown to a player, so a typo is findable instead of embarrassing.

Upgrades keep your edits. New keys are appended under a heading so "what is new in this version" is answerable by scrolling to the bottom, and a message you have not edited is quietly updated to the current wording while anything you have touched is left exactly alone.

Permissions

Every gate is a permission node, never a hardcoded op check — so a donor rank can have ten homes and a builder can have /craft without anybody being handed /stop.

Standards asks NeoForge's own PermissionAPI, so whatever you already run answers those questions and nothing here gets in its way. LuckPerms works out of the box, with no configuration on either side.

Ranks without installing a permissions mod

With nothing installed, NeoForge answers every question with the node's own default — which means you cannot grant anybody anything. A trusted regular cannot have flight, a donor cannot have ten homes, and a builder cannot have /craft without being made an operator.

So there is a handler for exactly that server. One line in neoforge-server.toml:

permissionHandler = "standards:permissions"

and /rank appears:

/rank group donor create
/rank group donor set standards.home.limit.10 true
/rank group moderator parent add donor      inheritance
/rank user Steve group add donor            works offline
/rank check Steve standards.home.limit.10

Groups with inheritance, per-player grants, standards.* wildcards, an explicit deny that beats everything, and a default group everybody is in without being put there.

Dormant unless you pick it — including on a server with no permissions mod at all. Installing Standards does not make it the handler. NeoForge decides which one is active, the default is its own, and it does not hand the job over just because nobody else wants it. So on a bare server you are still on NeoForge's handler until you write that line.

The symptom if you do not, and it is worth knowing because it looks like a missing feature rather than a setting: /rank is not registered at all. Not refused, not greyed out — absent, exactly as if the command did not exist. Everything else carries on working, because NeoForge's handler answers our nodes from operator status; you lose only the ability to grant anything to anyone who is not an operator.

Turning it on changes nothing until you grant something. A group or player with no entry has no opinion, so the node falls through to its own default — which is what it was doing before. You can switch it on, look around, and switch it back off, and nothing will have moved. Switching either way is that one line, with nothing to import and nothing to migrate off.

It tells you why

Every hour lost to a permissions system is spent asking why a player has something, and yes-or-no cannot answer that:

> /rank check Steve standards.home.others
  standards.home.others = yes (from donor, via standards.home.*)
> /rank check Steve standards.god
  standards.god = no (nothing set — the node's own default)

That second line matters as much as the first. A bare "no" reads as a rule somebody wrote, and sends you looking for one that does not exist.

A rank is a group, not just a bundle of nodes

Put somebody in moderator and they get their permission nodes, a chat tag, and visibility to every other mod on the server — one edit, no second list to keep in sync. A faction mod, a party mod or a quest mod can ask who your moderators are, because ranks are published through the same groups API everything else here uses.

That is the reason this exists. Permissions on their own are a solved problem; ranks that the rest of the server can actually see are not.

Players can climb it on their own

startingGroup = "guest"
promotions = ["guest -> regular after 24h and 2h played"]

New players land in guest and move up by themselves. Two clocks, because they answer different questions: real time asks for patience — a few minutes is enough to lose the fly-by griefer who is on another server by now — and played time asks them to have actually done something.

Played time counts only while somebody is online and not away. Minecraft's own statistic happily counts a player idling in a corner all night, which is exactly the promotion you did not want to give. Give both and both must pass.

/rank on its own is open to everyone and shows what you are and what is left: "next: regular — needs 18m more and 45m more played". A ladder a player cannot see is one that happens to them.

What it is not

No per-world contexts, no temporary nodes, no promotion tracks, no weights, no SQL backend, no web editor. This is enough to run a server, and honest about the line: if you need any of that, a dedicated permissions mod is a better tool and switching to one costs a single config line.

For other mods

Seven seams, all soft dependencies — add a compileOnly and Standards can be absent at runtime:

The switches API exists because a skill granting flight should not have to build a command string and hope: the skill is already the authority, so it calls in directly and skips the permission check that gates the typed command.

Combat tagging deserves a line of its own, because it is what stops /home being an escape hatch. Being hit by a player closes the escape routes while the tag lasts — and three rules make it behave:

• An attacker starts a tag, not damage. Fall, drowning, fire and freezing never tag anybody, which is what stops a player trapped by their own bad luck being sealed in by the very feature meant to protect them.
• Tags extend, they never overwrite. Twelve seconds of PvP then a zombie for eight is still twelve, or a shorter tag would rescue exactly the person fleeing.
• Pets are directional. Somebody's wolf biting you is them fighting you through a proxy; you hitting their wolf is not — so nobody can lock you in combat by shoving a pet in front of you.

And Harm.forbidden(a, b) answers whether one player may harm another at all, so a hostile skill — a curse, a snare, a summon — is refused for the same reasons a sword is. Player-on-player damage is gated centrally, so a mod that only deals damage needs no code whatever.

Factions ReForged is built entirely on these — claims, groups, chat and economy — and is the proof they work from the outside.

Reputation — what people think of you

/rep. A standing is one named group's opinion of one player: survivors, raiders, the_hospital. It is none of the three things it gets confused with — not membership (you can be loathed by a faction you belong to), not a single moral score, and not permission.

That middle distinction is the whole point. One number for your soul cannot say that the hospital trusts you and the raiders want you dead, and those are the interesting stories.

Standings are created the first time something writes one — a quest naming the_hospital makes it exist, with no list to maintain. /rep top <standing> ranks people, /rep list shows what exists, and named bands in config let a message say "the survivors consider you friendly" rather than "+40".

Like the money, exactly one store holds it: two that disagree about whether the survivors trust you is worse than either alone. Standards yields to any dedicated reputation mod without either side knowing the other exists.

Requirements

Standards is built for three Minecraft lines. Take the jar that names your version — every file carries it, so standards-1.4.0+mc26.1.2.jar is the 26.1 one.

⚠ 26.x needs Java 25, not 21. That is Minecraft's requirement rather than ours, and it is the one thing here that will stop a server booting — with an error that does not obviously say so. If you are moving up from 1.21.11, change the Java your server launches with at the same time.

Built and self-tested against NeoForge 21.11.42, 26.1.2.95 and 26.2.0.72. The floors above are what the jars actually declare, so a later build of the same line is fine.

Install on the server. That is all. No dependencies. Nothing for your players to install, and nothing that stops them joining from a stock client.

Credits and licence

MIT. All original work.

Inspired by Essentials / EssentialsX and FTB Essentials — read for intent, then built better. No code is taken from either.

By Sablednah. Source, issue tracker and full design notes on GitHub.