Locator Bar Rework

What this mod does

It makes location a resource instead of a constant.

The locator bar is suppressed for everyone, permanently. It stays empty. The only way anybody appears on it is if a player spends a Locator Stone — and spending one is loud.

When you use a stone, for ten seconds:

• You see every other player in your dimension on your locator bar.
• Everyone else sees you on theirs.
• The entire server gets a title announcing your name, your dimension, and your exact coordinates, plus a chat line that stays in the scrollback afterwards.

              Alice used a Locator Stone
        Overworld  ·  X: 1247   Y: 63   Z: -892

The Locator Stone

Reusable, on a five minute cooldown by default. Everything in the recipe is renewable, so nobody is locked out of the mechanic by loot luck.

A N A     A = Amethyst Shard
N C N     N = Eye of Ender
A N A     C = Compass

The cooldown is stored in player data rather than the vanilla item-cooldown map, so it survives death, reconnecting and server restarts. Dying is not a reset.

Hiding works again

Every vanilla way of staying off the locator bar also keeps you off a scan:

• Sneaking
• Invisibility
• A carved pumpkin
• Spectator mode

All four work by the same underlying mechanic, and the mod honours it rather than bypassing it. So crouching in a hole under a pumpkin is once again a real answer to being hunted — and a scan can never out a moderator who is spectating.

Your own exposure, on the other hand, is not dodgeable. You cannot crouch out of the announcement, and logging out mid-reveal leaves a marker frozen where you disconnected for the remaining time.

Configuration

Server-side, and synced to clients automatically.

Tuning it

scanPrecision is the strongest dial. CHUNK narrows a target to a 16×16 area; DIRECTION gives a bearing with no distance and no coordinates at all, turning the stone from a GPS into a compass. That is a very different game, and worth trying before assuming you want exact positions.

scanInaccuracyBlocks and markerWidthPixels do related but different jobs. Inaccuracy changes the data — the marker is genuinely displaced, by an amount rolled once per scan and then held so it cannot be averaged away over the ten seconds. Width changes only the drawing, making a marker cover an arc of the bar rather than a point. Use them together: width alone looks vague while remaining exact underneath, and inaccuracy alone is vague without looking it.

If scans feel too frequent, raise cooldownSeconds before shortening revealDurationSeconds. A short reveal is merely frustrating; a long cooldown makes each scan a real decision.

Installation

Required on the server and on every client — it registers a real item, so vanilla clients are rejected at registry sync.

Notes

• Waypoints are same-dimension only. That is vanilla behaviour; the server keeps one waypoint manager per dimension. The announcement names the dimension, and deliberately withholds coordinates from players in a different one — a stone used in the Nether would otherwise publish numbers anyone can multiply by eight to find your Overworld base.
• /gamerule locatorBar false still works and disables stones along with everything else.
• Uninstalling is clean. Suppression is applied as a transient attribute modifier and is never written to player data, so removing the mod restores vanilla behaviour immediately rather than leaving everyone permanently untrackable.
• The mod is server-side logic almost end to end. The one client-side Mixin exists solely to widen markers, since that size is hardcoded in vanilla's renderer. Leave markerWidthPixels at 9 and it changes nothing.

FAQ

Will this be updated to a newer Minecraft version?

Possibly, but I am not promising a timeline. This is a personal project and it gets worked on when I have the time and the interest. Major Minecraft releases may get a port — I would like to keep it current — but treat every update as something that happens when it happens rather than something scheduled. If a version you want is missing, it is not abandoned, it just has not come around yet.

Will you backport it to older versions?

No. The mod leans on the data-driven enchantment system and on APIs that only exist in recent versions; older builds would need a substantial rewrite rather than a recompile.

Are you taking feature requests / bug reports?

Bug reports are welcome and useful — especially anything involving item loss or duplication, which I take seriously. Feature requests I will read, but I build this to a fairly specific design idea, and "add an enchantment that does X" will usually only land if X fits the context-and-tradeoff theme.

Fabric / Forge port?

Not planned. It is built on NeoForge-specific APIs, so this would be a rewrite rather than a port.

Can I use this in a modpack?

Yes. It is MIT licensed — pack it, tune it, redistribute it. No permission needed and no credit required, though it is always appreciated.

Do players need it installed, or just the server?

Both. Enchantments are synced from the server's registries, so clients need the mod too.

Something broke after a NeoForge update.

Likely, and not surprising — NeoForge for this Minecraft version is still in beta, so the API underneath this mod is still moving. Report it and include your NeoForge version.