Nicknames

A Paper plugin that scrambles player identities for scripted or staged SMPs. A nicknamed player becomes someone else everywhere it's visible — name tag, tab list, chat, join/leave, death and advancement messages, the multiplayer server-list hover, and their skin — all through Paper's real profile-swap API, not a display-name trick layered on top of it.

By default nothing happens automatically: players keep their real identity until staff nick them, or you turn on scramble-on-join for arrivals to be renamed on sight.

🎭 Main Features

🪪 Identity Swapping

• Assign an exact nickname to a player, fixed and persistent across restarts
• Or hand out a random name from a pool you define, with no two online players ever sharing one
• Scramble a player to a brand-new random name on the spot (a staged death, a new "arc")
• Reset back to a real identity at any time
• Assignments (fixed or random) survive a restart — a player who logs back in keeps whichever name they were last wearing

🖼️ Real Skins, Not Just a Name

For each nickname, a skin is resolved in order:

1. An explicit skin you've configured for that specific nickname
2. If the nickname happens to be a real Mojang account, that account's actual skin (fetched live)
3. A random skin file from a folder you fill with your own cast
4. The default skin (Steve, Alex, or none)

👁️ Every Surface, Rewritten

• Name tag, tab list, and chat all follow the real player-profile swap, not a cosmetic overlay
• Join and leave messages rewritten to the nickname
• Death and kill messages rewritten — everyone's nickname substituted, not just the one who died
• Advancement broadcasts rewritten the same way
• The multiplayer server-list player sample (hover-to-see-who's-online) shows nicknames instead of real names
• A nicked player's login session is re-asserted with AuthMe (if installed) after every profile swap, since AuthMe keys its own sessions on name — without this, changing a player's visible name would demand they register again

🙈 Staying Out of It

• A blacklist (by name or UUID) for players who should never be auto-nicked on join — manual /nick set still works on them
• Scoreboard-tag opt-out, so bot/NPC plugins never get renamed and become impossible to command by name — PvpBot's own bots (pvpbot) and most NPC plugins (NPC) are exempted by default, and nonick exempts anyone else you tag with it

⚠️ Honest Limits

Bukkit deliberately keeps a player's real login name fixed for the whole session — no public API can override it. So vanilla command targeting and tab-completion (/tp, /msg, and similar) still resolve players by their real name even while nicked; only the player-facing surfaces above are rewritten.

📋 Commands

All under /nick, gated by the nick.admin permission.

/nick set <player> <nickname>          - assign a fixed nickname, remembered across restarts
/nick scramble <player>                - force a brand-new random nickname right now
/nick reset <player>                   - restore their real identity (aliases: clear, off, real)
/nick blacklist add <player>           - exempt a player from auto-nicking on join
/nick blacklist remove <player>
/nick blacklist list
/nick list                             - show everyone currently nicked, real name -> nickname
/nick reload                           - reload config.yml and clear the cached skin lookups

⚙️ Configuration Highlights (config.yml)

• scramble-on-join — hand a random pool name to any unassigned arrival (off by default)
• blacklist / ignore-tags — who never gets auto-nicked
• fixed — permanent name -> nickname assignments (what /nick set writes into)
• name-pool — the cast of random names handed out; pool-exhausted decides whether to invent a GuestNNNN name or leave the pool empty
• skins.use-mojang-lookup, skins.folder, skins.default, skins.by-nick — the skin resolution order described above
• rewrite.* — toggle each surface (join-leave, chat, death, advancement, server-list) independently