Epistula

Mail for Hytale servers: send an item, a short message or both to any player, even offline, with a mailbox and a full history.

Epistula is a server plugin. Everything runs on the server and is saved in its own database, so players need nothing installed. Every send, collect and archive is written to the server log.

Epistula is in English, Portuguese, German, Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese. Each player sees it in their game language, with no setup.

Features

✉️ Send an item and a message

• /mail <player> opens the Send tab, with your whole inventory on the left: pick an item, set the quantity, and write a message of up to 255 characters and 8 lines if you want.
• A message alone works too, with no item.
• The recipient can be offline, as long as they have joined the server before. The name field suggests players as you type, online ones first.
• One item type per mail. Any item can go: the mail doesn't ask for a price or an owner.
• Messages are always shown as plain text: no colors, no commands, no emoji.

📬 The mailbox

• The recipient sees a notice on the right of the screen, or when they log in, with how many mails are waiting. It doesn't lock the player: /mail opens the mailbox and /mail close hides the notice.
• /mail opens the Mailbox: collect the item, read the message, or archive a mail that only has a message.
• Reply opens the Send tab with the sender already filled in, even if they changed their name since.
• With no room in the inventory, the item stays in the mailbox. Nothing expires: a mail waits until it is collected.

📜 The history

• The History tab shows everything you sent and received, collected or not, in the Sent and Received tabs, with the date and the status. It is kept forever.

🔒 Safe by design

• The item leaves your inventory and enters the database in a single operation: it is never lost and never duplicated.
• The database is Epistula's own, embedded in the mod. A copy is made before each schema update.

🪙 Attach money (optional)

• With a payment provider chosen by the admin, a mail can also carry an amount of money, and each send pays a fee: a fixed base plus a percentage of the amount.
• The Send tab shows your balance, the amount and the fee. The recipient collects the item and the money with the same button.
• The provider can be any economy registered in VaultUnlocked, or an economy mod that registers itself in Epistula through its API. Without a provider, none of this shows and the mail is free.
• A payment is never charged twice, even if the server crashes in the middle. When an answer from the economy never came, the mail waits in the admin's Payments tab to be checked.
• Money always shows with its currency and in the reader's number format: 1,250 in English, 1.250 in Portuguese.

🎡 Works with an action wheel (optional)

• With Actio, an optional action wheel mod, the Mailbox shows in its wheel (hold E with an empty hand), under Social, with a red dot while there is mail to collect. Without it, the mail is /mail, as always.

🔌 For other mods

• A public API: another mod can deliver mail to a player (an item, a message or an amount, from a player or from the mod itself), for a reward, a notice, or to move its own old mail into Epistula with the original send date. A delivery is never made twice.
• Another mod can also be the payment provider of the mail.
• If another mod takes /mail or /epistula, the server log says which one.

🛠️ Admin menu

• /epistula admin opens an in-game admin menu in three tabs: Mail (any player's history, online or offline, with name suggestions), Settings (every option of config.json, with Save, Undo and Reload file) and Payments (payments pending or waiting for the admin to check).
• The windows share the look of the author's other mods: the game's blue, gold details and a wax seal with a letter.

Requirements

Each Epistula version supports one Hytale update. The Hytale API changes with each update, so don't update your server to a new Hytale update before an Epistula version for it is out.

Installation

1. Stop the server.
2. Put Epistula-<version>.jar in the server's mods folder. Keep only one Epistula jar there.
3. Start the server. Epistula creates its files in mods/Merlinz_Epistula/.
4. Make yourself OP (/op add <name> in the console) and type /epistula in the game to check it is loaded.
5. To attach money to mail, pick a provider in config.json (PaymentProvider) or in the admin menu.

Back up the mods/Merlinz_Epistula/ folder together with the world (universe/), with the server stopped. Restoring only one of them can duplicate or lose items that are in the mail.

Commands

Players (no permission needed)

Admins

The permission of each command is merlinz.epistula.command. followed by its path. A subcommand also needs the permission of the command above it. OPs have all of them.

Configuration

mods/Merlinz_Epistula/config.json, applied with /epistula reload or from the admin menu:

A file that can't be read, with an unknown key or a value out of range, is refused whole, with the reason in the log, and the mod keeps the settings it had.

Known limits

• The translations of German, Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese have not been reviewed by native speakers yet. Server logs and config file errors are always in English.
• A message costs nothing, so a player can fill another player's mailbox with messages; they are archived one by one.
• The game saves inventories outside Epistula's database. A server crash at the exact moment an item moves is the one case no order of operations can fully cover.

License

Free to use on any number of servers, including monetized servers. You may not republish, redistribute, sell or distribute modified versions of Epistula. See the license on this page for the full text.

Epistula is an unofficial mod. It is not made, endorsed or supported by Hypixel.

Support

Epistula is free. If it helps your server, you can support its development on Ko-fi. Thank you!