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, ignored by mob AI. 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.

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, and one thing to know first

Standards uses NeoForge's own PermissionAPI, which means LuckPerms works out of the box — and so does having no permissions mod at all. Verified both ways: a fresh server with nothing installed gives ordinary players the everyone-commands and operators the op-gated ones, and a LuckPerms grant applies live without a restart.

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

For other mods

Five 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.

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

Requirements

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.