Skirmish

An escape tool and a combat lock, for servers where loot can be taken.

Free and open source. Paper 1.21+. No dependencies, no database, no economy hook.

Two mechanics that only make sense together. A combat lock on its own is a punishment. An escape tool on its own is a way to never be caught. Together they say something specific: you may not leave a fight, but you may always try to survive one.

The Blink Feather

Right-click and you are twenty blocks away — behind the pillar, on the roof, across the ravine.

It cannot cross a wall. The ray stops at the first block a body cannot occupy, so it can never put somebody inside a base, a vault or a locked room — regardless of what protection plugin you run, or whether you run one at all. This is geometry, not a permission check.

It refuses instead of killing you. Aim across a ravine and there is no floor within reach, so the blink is declined rather than dropping you twenty blocks. A movement tool that can kill you is one nobody presses at four hearts, which is the only moment it is for.

A refusal costs nothing. No landing means no cooldown spent. A tool that eats its cooldown on a failed activation fails at exactly the moment somebody needed it.

It lands you as far as it can reach, not one step in. Look at a rooftop eighteen blocks off and you arrive on the rooftop.

Both ends draw a puff and play a note. Deliberate: a pursuer has to be able to follow. An escape nobody can track is a disappearance, and the chase is the point.

The combat lock

Any hit between two players puts both in combat for a configurable window. Ender pearls, chorus fruit and teleport commands are refused while tagged, and an action bar shows the seconds remaining — a player who cannot see the timer experiences a refused teleport as a broken command rather than as a rule.

The feather is exempt, and that is not a hole: it is bounded by its range, it cannot cross a wall, it leaves a visible trail at both ends, and it costs a cooldown. None of that is true of a pearl chain.

Mobs do not tag you by default. On a server full of hostile mobs that would be a near-permanent lock — a worse bug than the one it fixes. Turn it on deliberately for boss or raid events.

Commands

/skirmish give [player] — mint a Blink Feather

/skirmish reload — re-read the config

Permissions: skirmish.admin for both (default op), skirmish.bypass to teleport freely while in combat (default false).

Configuration

Range defaults to 20 blocks, cooldown to 5 seconds, combat window to 15 seconds.

Pick the range against your arenas, not against a feeling. The blink should cross most of a fighting space and never the whole of it. At 20 blocks in a 26-wide room, an escape moves you out of reach while leaving your pursuer in the same fight. Set it wider than your arenas and the tool stops being a decision.

Install

Drop the jar into plugins/, restart, and run /skirmish give.

Source

https://github.com/Vexoris/skirmish

The decision about where a blink lands lives in BlinkPlan, which touches no Bukkit type at all and is covered by its own test suite. That split is why the safety properties — cannot pass a wall, refuses over a void, never lands you inside a block — are proven offline rather than asserted in a comment. The tests are written so a no-op implementation fails them.

GPL-3.0-or-later.