Shroud

The short version

A shrouded player carries on exactly as they were. They can be seen, walked into, hit and killed like anyone else. The server just stops telling everyone who they are.

I wrote this because I wanted a hitman on my server, and every "hide player" plugin I tried just vanished them, which rather defeats the point of a hitman.





What actually gives someone away

More than you would think, which is why this covers all of it.

• The tab list — relabelled to the alias, or taken out of the list entirely. Your choice.
• The name tag — gone, for the whole server at once.
• The skin — swapped. People recognise the skin walking towards them long before they read a name.
• Chat — sent under the alias, in whatever format you already use.
• Join and leave messages — dropped.
• Death messages — dropped for any death they are mixed up in. Steve was slain by eyPiper gives more away than the tab list ever will.
• Advancements — no broadcast. (Paper only — see compatibility.)
• Command completion — their name stops appearing when people tab through /msg.
• /list — answers with the alias.

Every one of those can be switched off on its own if you only want some of it.




Borrowed skins

This is my favourite part.

If nobody owns that name it quietly falls back to the default skin. Lookups go to Mojang once per name, off the main thread, and are cached for a day. If the server cannot reach Mojang at all, the skin is left alone rather than mangled.




Commands

Command	What it does
/shroud toggle <player> [alias]	Hide them, or bring them back
/shroud on <player> [alias]	Shroud them, whatever state they were in
/shroud off <player>	Lift it
/shroud alias <player> <alias>	Change who they appear to be
/shroud list	Who is shrouded, and as what
/shroud reload	Reread config.yml and apply it

toggle is the one you actually type. on and off are still there for scripts and command blocks, which want a form that does not depend on what the state happened to be.

Shrouds survive restarts. Someone shrouded when the server went down is still shrouded when they log back in.


Permissions

Node	Default	Grants
shroud.manage	op	Use /shroud
shroud.bypass	op	See real names in chat, completion and /list

One rule worth knowing: bypass never applies to your own shroud. Staff carry on reading real names off everybody else, but somebody who is shrouded themselves is hidden from themselves too. Otherwise the one person who most needs to know it is working is the only one who cannot see it.

Shroud someone who holds bypass and it tells you so first, spells out exactly what they would still be able to read, and gives you two buttons to pick from. No silent half-working shroud.




Config

The parts people actually change:

Set chat-format to match whatever your chat plugin prints for everyone else. A line that looks different from every other line is a giveaway on its own.




Spigot and Paper

It runs on both, and tells you which one it found at startup.

Paper	Spigot
Tab list, name tag, skin, chat, deaths, joins, completion, /list	Yes	Yes
Advancement broadcasts	Hidden	Cannot be hidden
The shrouded player's own screen	Immediate	At next login

Advancements are the one hard stop. The event exists on Spigot, but nothing on it lets the broadcast be called off — so on Spigot that layer switches itself off and says so in the console. Everything else is identical.




Things worth knowing before you install

I would rather you knew these up front than found them out later.









Installing

Drop the jar in plugins, start the server, then /shroud on <player>.

The defaults are the settings I actually run.


Bugs and requests

Post them in the discussion tab rather than the reviews — I read both, but I can only reply to one of them.

If something is not hiding that you think should be, tell me what gave it away and I will have a look.