Hide Or Hunt

Hide your beacon. Hunt everyone else's. Last team standing wins.

Hide Or Hunt is a team-based Spigot minigame built around one object: your team's beacon. Every team gets one at the start of the grace period and has to hide it somewhere on the map. While your beacon stands, your team respawns forever. Once someone finds it and breaks it, the next death is permanent — Bedwars-style final kills. The last team with a surviving player or a standing beacon takes the win.

No lobby setup, no world templates, no arena schematics. Point it at whatever world you're already playing on, set a scatter region, and start.

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How a match plays

WAITING  →  (PRE-GRACE PVP)  →  GRACE PERIOD  →  HUNTING  →  ENDED  →  auto-reset

Phase	What happens
Waiting	Admins build teams, assign players, capture the starter kit and set spawns.
Pre-Grace PVP (optional, off by default)	An opening rush. Teams are scattered and PVP is already live — but no beacon exists yet, so nothing can be looted, and no death here is final. Pure fight for early gear.
Grace Period	One random member of each team is handed that team's beacon and has to hide it. PVP is forced off and compasses are dead, no matter what the settings say.
Hunting	Compasses go live and start pointing at enemy beacons. PVP follows your toggle. Beacons start falling.
Ended	Winner (or draw) announced, then the plugin resets itself back to Waiting after ten seconds — ready for the next round with teams and spawns intact.

The win condition is re-checked after every beacon break and every death, never on a timer, so a match ends the instant it's actually over.

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Features

🔦 Team beacons that can't be cheesed

Each team's beacon is a real item tagged in its persistent data container — plain beacons players mine or craft are completely untouched and behave exactly like vanilla. A team can never break, move, or re-place its own beacon, and the block is protected from the loopholes that would otherwise let them delete it quietly:

• Explosions — pulled out of the blast list for both TNT and block explosions.
• Pistons — extend and retract are cancelled if they'd shift a registered beacon.
• No drops — a destroyed beacon leaves nothing behind, so it can't be picked up and hidden again.

Break one and the whole server hears about it.

💀 Final kills

Beacon	On death
Standing	Normal respawn at your team's start point. Inventory wiped — unless Respawn With Kit is on.
Destroyed	Final kill. Nothing drops, and you respawn locked in spectator mode exactly where you fell, free to watch the rest of the match.

Logging out is not an elimination. Nobody hands their team the match by rage-quitting.

🧭 Compass tracking

Right-click any vanilla compass to cycle through enemy beacons — no custom item to hand out, nothing to craft. It only targets enemy teams whose beacon is placed and still standing, reports on the action bar (Tracking - Team Cyan - 142, 68, -391), and does absolutely nothing before the hunting phase, so nobody can watch you hide.

📊 Live scoreboard

A flicker-free sidebar with the phase, the countdown or elapsed time, and every team's live status — Alive, Not Placed, No Respawns (beacon gone but still fighting) and Eliminated. Updates once a second and immediately on any state change. Everyone shares one scoreboard, which is what colours names, nametags and the tab list per team.

⚙️ In-game admin GUI

/hoh gui opens a settings panel — toggles for PVP, autosmelt, beacon-only crafting, team chat, global freeze and respawn-with-kit, plus anvil-input fields for grace period length, pre-grace PVP length and team size. Type a bad value and it reopens the anvil instead of silently dropping it; escape out and nothing changes. No config reloads, no server restarts.

🔥 Autosmelt

Optional. Ore drops and mob food arrive already smelted — raw iron/gold/copper, ancient debris, every meat and fish, potatoes. Conversion happens at the source, so a block can never drop both forms, and vanilla drops are asked for first: Fortune still counts and Silk Touch still works.

🧊 Freeze

Three stacking scopes — global, per-team, per-player. A frozen player can't move, can't deal damage and can't take damage, but keeps head rotation so they aren't stuck staring at a wall. OP is always exempt, at every scope.

🛠 Beacon-only crafting

Optional hardcore twist: real crafting tables stop working entirely, and the only 3×3 grid in the game is the one you open by right-clicking your own placed team beacon. Want to craft? Go home.

⚔️ Pre-grace PVP rush

Optional opening phase where teams are scattered with kits and PVP already live, before anyone is safe — so contesting the middle for gear actually costs something. Two rules keep it from deciding the match on its own: beacons don't exist yet (nothing to loot), and rush deaths are never final.

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Commands

Everything lives under /hoh (alias /hideorhunt). Run /hoh or /hoh help to list every subcommand you have permission for — subcommands, team numbers and player names all tab-complete.

Command	Effect
/hoh team create	Create the next numbered team, auto-assigned the next colour.
/hoh team invite <player> <team>	Drop a player straight onto a team.
/hoh team list	Every team, its colour, status and roster.
/hoh team clear	Wipe all teams.
/hoh setKit	Snapshot your whole inventory — hotbar, main, armour, offhand — as the starter kit.
/hoh setSpawn <team> [clear]	Pin a team's start point where you stand, or clear it to scatter them instead.
/hoh setRegion <radius>	Set the scatter region, centred on you (1–100000).
/hoh gui	Open the admin settings panel.
/hoh start	Begin the match.
/hoh stop (alias /hoh end)	Abort and reset to Waiting.
/hoh freeze global|team <n>|player <name>	Freeze, at any scope. /hoh unfreeze for the inverse.
/hoh tc <message> (alias /hoh teamchat)	Team-only chat.

/hoh start validates everything up front and tells you exactly what's wrong — fewer than two teams with players, fewer than two with online players, or a team that needs scattering with no region set. When it refuses, nothing has changed.

Permissions

Node	Default	Grants
hideorhunt.admin	op	Every command except team chat.
hideorhunt.play	everyone	/hoh tc.

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Quick start

/hoh team create        # once per team
/hoh team invite Steve 1
/hoh team invite Alex 2
/hoh setKit             # while holding the loadout you want
/hoh setRegion 1500     # scatter area, centred on you
/hoh setSpawn 1         # optional: pin a team to a fixed point
/hoh start

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Installation

1. Drop the jar into your server's plugins/ folder.
2. Start the server — plugins/HideOrHunt/config.yml is generated for you.
3. Give your admins hideorhunt.admin (OPs already have it).

Team spawns, the starter kit and every setting persist across restarts. Team rosters are per-session by design — rebuild them in seconds with /hoh team create and /hoh team invite.

Supports up to nine teams, each with its own colour (gray, red, green, cyan, white, purple, yellow, light blue, blue). A tenth is rejected with a clear message rather than quietly giving two teams the same colour.

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Compatibility

Platform	Spigot 1.21.11 — Paper and its forks work too, but no Paper-only APIs are used
Java	21
Dependencies	None

Built against the current API with zero deprecation warnings — no legacy openWorkbench, no fromLegacyText, and the anvil input uses a genuine AnvilView so it behaves exactly like a real anvil.

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Inspired by the Hide or Hunt gamemode.