LobbyGuard

A simple, reliable way to survive lobby restarts without queue confusion or players getting stuck on the wrong server.

When your main lobby server crashes or restarts, LobbyGuard automatically redirects players who were on it to a backup server. As soon as lobby comes back online, the plugin sends those same players back — without touching anyone who ended up on the backup server on their own.

Features

• Automatic redirect from the main server to a backup server on kick/disconnect
• Automatic return to the main server as soon as it's back online
• Never confuses evacuated players with players who joined the backup server by themselves
• Lightweight TOML config — just server names and ping intervals
• Debug mode for verbose logging

How it works

1. A player gets kicked from lobby (e.g. the server crashed) — the plugin intercepts this and redirects them to the backup server, marking them as evacuated.
2. The plugin periodically pings lobby. As soon as it responds again, every evacuated player still online and still on the backup server is automatically sent back to lobby.
3. Players who ended up on the backup server through any other means are never touched by the plugin.

Configuration

After the first run, plugins/lobbyguard/config.toml will look like this:

lobby-server = "lobby"
sur-server = "sur"
check-interval-seconds = 5
ping-timeout-seconds = 3
debug = false

• lobby-server / sur-server — server names exactly as in velocity.toml
• check-interval-seconds — how often to check whether lobby is back online
• ping-timeout-seconds — how long to wait for a ping response before treating the server as offline
• debug — verbose console logging

Requirements

• Velocity 3.4.0+
• Java 21+

Limitations

• The list of evacuated players is kept in memory and does not survive a restart of the Velocity proxy itself.
• If the configured servers aren't found in velocity.toml, a warning is logged and the action is skipped.

Source code

Source code is available on request from the author.