SpeedVaro – Hero Island Drop

A lightweight, self-contained Varo / Speed-UHC / battle-royale minigame for Paper servers. Players drop from a glass cage in the sky with elytras, farm in peace for a while, then fight inside a shrinking world border. Everything is controlled through in-game menus – no command memorising required.

Languages: English by default, German included – set language: de in the config. Every message lives in messages_en.yml / messages_de.yml in the plugin folder, so you can adjust texts or add your own language file.

Built for Paper 1.21+ (Java 21). No hard plugin dependencies – see requirements below.

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Features

• Phase System: Smooth progression from Lobby → Farm time → Fight (shrinking border) → Winner celebration. The live scoreboard tracks the current phase, countdown, border size, players alive, and your team.
• Elytra Drop: Rounds begin with a 5-second countdown. The glass cage dissolves, and every participant glides down with an unbreakable flight elytra to a landing spot of their choice. The elytra disappears upon landing.
• Lives & Respawn (Blue Hearts): Players start with a configurable number of respawns (default: 3). Dying with hearts left keeps your inventory: you hover as a spectator above the arena for 5 seconds, then glide down again. A death without hearts left is final.
• Death Loot Chests: On final death, the complete inventory (armor, offhand, exact durability, and enchantments) is secured in a double chest at the death spot with a floating 60-second timer. The chest can be opened but not broken, and vanishes with its contents when the timer ends.
• Teams & Shared Backpack: Create and join up to 8 color-coded teams via the menu. Team colors and [Team X] prefixes show in the tab list and above heads. Teammates cannot damage each other (though knockback/boosting remains active) and share a 27-slot team backpack. Sneak + right-click a teammate to view their inventory.
• Farm-Time Quality of Life:
  • No damage, no hunger, and no PvP during the farming phase.
  • Night vision for everyone from the drop until the fight starts – caves and nights are no obstacle.
  • Ores drop as ingots, and animals drop cooked food automatically (auto-smelter).
  • Whole trees fall when chopping a single log, and drops go straight into your inventory.
  • Wooden tools craft as iron; diamond tools craft pre-enchanted (Efficiency IV, Unbreaking III).
  • Virtual /anvil and /enchant tables (full 15-bookshelf power) available on the go if you carry the block.
• No Hostile Mobs: Zombies, creepers, phantoms and friends never spawn in the arena world while a round is prepared or running. Animals are unaffected, spawn eggs and /summon still work – no gamerules to set.
• Uniform Food: Animals drop cooked beef (plus leather and wool) to keep food management streamlined.
• Cave Elevator: A one-time use item given at the drop – right-click below Y=0 to teleport straight back to the surface.
• Fair Arena Locations: /varosetup searches for a random location 10,000–50,000 blocks out, filtering out oceans, rivers, deserts, and low elevations, never reuses an area, and pre-generates the surrounding chunks so nobody drops into unloaded terrain.
• Better World Generation: Extra diamond veins and much more sugar cane along shores in newly generated arena chunks (both configurable).
• Safe Inventories: Normal player inventories and XP are safely stored on disk when entering the arena world and fully restored upon leaving. Arena loot never leaves the arena.
• Winner Celebration: Title and fanfare, server-wide announcement, fireworks in team colour, configurable reward commands for every winner, and everyone returns to spawn after 10 seconds.
• Update Notice: Checks Modrinth once at startup and tells the console and admins when a newer version exists. Nothing is downloaded; update-check: false turns it off.
• Locked Down: Command blocking (shops, teleports, /home, /back), disabled Nether portals, and an invitation system with clickable [Accept] / [Decline] chat buttons.
• Multilingual: English and German out of the box; every message is editable and additional languages are a single YAML file away.

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How a round works

1. Admin → Build arena. A random location is chosen, the border is centred there and a 9×9 glass cage appears at Y=200. The lobby opens.
2. Admin invites players from a head list. Invited players click [Accept] in chat and are teleported into the cage. Players form teams in the menu.
3. Admin → Start round. Countdown, cage dissolves, everyone glides down. Farm time begins (default 20 min).
4. Fight. The border shrinks smoothly to its target size (default 500 blocks over 30 min). PvP is on.
5. Last party standing wins – a team, or a solo player without a team. Celebration, rewards, back to spawn.

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Commands

Players

• /varo – Opens the main menu (join/leave, teams, backpack, spectate)
• /varoaccept / /varocancel – Accept or decline a game invitation
• /varoleave (/leave) – Leave the arena and restore your normal inventory
• /varobackpack (/backpack, /bp) – Open your team's shared chest
• /varospec (/spec) – Spectator menu to teleport to living players
• /varoanvil (/anvil) / /varoenchant (/enchant) – Open virtual workstations

Admins (varo.admin) – all also available as buttons in /varo → Admin

• /varosetup [borderSize] – Find a location, build the cage, and open the lobby
• /varostart [farmMin] [targetSize] [shrinkSec] – Start the countdown and drop
• /varoreset – Reset the arena world and send everyone home
• /varosafenet <on|off> – Auto-teleport joining players into the cage during the lobby phase
• /varo reload – Reload config and messages without restarting

The admin menu additionally offers a Settings page (border size, farm time, target size, shrink time, lives, countdown, chunk pre-generation, start time of day) and Remove player for participants who went offline and would otherwise block the win.

Aliases only work if no other plugin claims the same name; the varo… form always works. Note that /enchant shadows the vanilla operator command (/minecraft:enchant still works).

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Permissions

• varo.admin (default: op) – All admin commands and menus, joining without invitation. Includes varo.invite.
• varo.invite (default: false) – Only the Invite players button – for helpers who may invite but not run the round.

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Configuration

Generated automatically as plugins/SpeedVaro/config.yml. Fully customizable border sizes, timer durations, lives, rewards, blocked commands and language. The defaults section can also be edited in-game via the settings menu, and /varo reload applies config and message changes without a restart.

language: en               # en or de; add messages_<code>.yml for more
arena-world: varo          # the only world /varosetup may build in
lobby-world: world         # where /leave, reset and the post-game return go

blocked-commands:          # blocked in the arena world during a round
  - shop
  - tpa
  - tpahere
  - tpaccept
  - tphere
  - back
  - spawn
  - warp
  - rtp
farm-blocked-commands:     # blocked only during farm time
  - ah
  - sethome
  - home

extra-diamond-veins-per-chunk: 2   # 0 = off
extra-sugar-cane: true

block-hostile-mobs: true   # no natural hostile spawns in the arena world (spawn eggs and /summon still work)
farm-night-vision: true    # night vision from the drop until the fight starts
update-check: true         # notify console and admins about new versions on Modrinth

win-rewards:               # console commands per winner, %player% is replaced
  - "eco give %player% 1000"
win-rewards-text: "&a+1000 Money"

defaults:
  border-size: 2000
  farm-minutes: 20
  target-size: 500
  shrink-minutes: 30
  lives: 3                 # respawns; 0 = classic Varo, one death and you're out
  countdown-seconds: 5
  preload-chunk-radius: 10
  start-time: 1000         # world time at build/drop, -1 = leave unchanged

Translating

messages_en.yml and messages_de.yml are copied into plugins/SpeedVaro/ on first start. To add a language, copy messages_en.yml to messages_<code>.yml, translate the values (keep the {0} placeholders and & colour codes), and set language: <code>. Any key missing from your file falls back to English.

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Requirements

Required

• Paper 1.21 or newer – tested on 1.21.1, 1.21.11 and 26.2 (Spigot is not supported – the plugin uses Paper's Adventure API)
• Java 21
• A separate arena world. SpeedVaro never builds in your main world; it needs its own world named as configured in arena-world (default varo). The plugin does not create worlds itself, so you need a world manager such as Multiverse-Core: /mv create varo NORMAL.

No gamerules or other world settings are needed – mob spawning and night vision are handled by the plugin.

Optional – works with, not required

• A permissions plugin (e.g. LuckPerms) to hand out varo.admin / varo.invite to non-ops
• An economy or points plugin (EssentialsX, PlayerPoints, …) if you want winner rewards – the plugin runs whatever console commands you put in win-rewards
• Chunky to pre-generate the whole arena area (SpeedVaro pre-generates only the centre)
• TAB – compatible, but its nametag feature must be disabled for the arena world so team prefixes show (scoreboard-teams.disable-condition: '%world%=varo')

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Setup

1. Drop SpeedVaro-x.y.z.jar into plugins/ and restart.
2. Create the arena world, e.g. /mv create varo NORMAL.
3. Set lobby-world in the config to your hub/spawn world (and language if you want German).
4. Optional: for a fully pre-generated arena, run Chunky on the coordinates printed by /varosetup.

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About this project

SpeedVaro was developed with AI assistance (Claude). The concept, gameplay rules, balancing, testing and every design decision are by the author; the code and this page were written together with an AI coding assistant. Screenshots are real in-game captures.

Source code and issue tracker: github.com/HrKato4949/SpeedVaro · License: GPL-3.0