SponsorVouch 3.4.0 — Premium Experience Update

A cleaner interface, better player feedback, and a more polished sponsorship experience.

Version 3.4.0 focuses on making SponsorVouch easier to understand and more enjoyable to use. Inventory menus, progression information, sponsorship interactions, and administrative feedback have been refined while preserving the existing gameplay mechanics.

What's New

Redesigned Player Experience

The main menu has been refined with a clearer layout and more consistent visual presentation.

• Improved 27-slot menu with a stronger information hierarchy.
• Clearer presentation of player status, progression requirements, sponsorship relationships, and available actions.
• Consistent colors for actions, information, and restrictions.
• Improved explanations when an action is unavailable.
• Explicit loading and error states instead of blocking the interface during database reads.
• Background database operations for menu data.

The interface remains fully usable with a standard Minecraft client. No resource pack or client-side mods are required.

Improved Sponsorship Management

• Added pagination to sponsorship lists, allowing players to browse all their relationships instead of seeing only five.
• Improved sponsorship confirmation messages with the target player and request expiration information.
• Added safe, clickable command suggestions for confirmation.
• Preserved permission checks and protection against outdated GUI interactions.

Clearer Player Progression

• Improved Immigrant, Resident, and Citizen status presentation.
• Progression requirements now reflect actual configuration values.
• Improved playtime displays with hours and minutes.
• Removed ambiguous progress indicators.
• Improved feedback for eligibility requirements and progression milestones.

Trust Tree Improvements

• Improved readability of sponsorship relationships.
• Limited displayed relationships to 50 players per view.
• Added explicit truncation information when results exceed the display limit.
• Simplified hover information to reduce visual clutter.

Administrative Improvements

• More consistent administrative messages.
• Improved localized status labels.
• More accurate success and failure feedback.
• Clearer permission-related responses.

Fixes & Reliability

• Player status updates are now published only after successful persistence.
• Progression celebrations no longer spawn fireworks that can damage entities.
• Improved aura behavior so visual effects follow the player.
• Preserved safe inventory interactions, deferred clicks, and stale-view validation.
• Improved GUI responsiveness by moving appropriate database reads off the main server thread.

Compatibility

The same universal JAR supports all four verified Paper versions.

Paper	Required Java
1.21.11	Java 21
26.1.2	Java 25
26.2	Java 25
26.3	Java 25

Existing configurations, permissions, sponsorship relationships, and SQLite schema remain compatible.

No additional runtime dependencies are required.

Testing & Validation

SponsorVouch 3.4.0 completed:

• 382 automated tests passing on Java 25
• 167 shared tests passing on Java 21
• 22 real Paper server process runs
• Successful startup and shutdown across all four supported Paper versions
• Verified SQLite persistence and backup restoration
• Verified cross-version database portability
• Static analysis with no reported violations under the configured rules
• Reproducible build verification

Upgrading from 3.3.0

No database schema migration is required.

1. Stop your Minecraft server.
2. Back up your existing plugins/SponsorVouch/ directory.
3. Replace the previous JAR with SponsorVouch-3.4.0.jar.
4. Start the server.
5. Verify your configuration, player statuses, and permissions.

Beta Notice

SponsorVouch 3.4.0 is ready for controlled testing, but is not yet classified as a stable release.

Automated tests and real Paper server-side integration checks have passed. Full multiplayer testing with connected Minecraft clients is still pending.

Some previously identified reliability risks remain under investigation, including the atomicity of certain warning and seed operations and synchronous database work outside the updated menus.

Please report any bugs, visual issues, or unexpected behavior through the project's issue tracker.