AnonymousPotion

A player under Invisibility never has their username shown in a death message. It is replaced with obfuscated text — the scrambling characters Minecraft animates client-side.

One exception: when the invisible player dies, their own name is shown in plain text.

Zeffut was slain by ▓╫≡┼╪▒≈╬
Zeffut tried to swim in lava to escape ▓╫≡┼╪▒≈╬
Steve was slain by Zeffut          ← Zeffut is invisible, but he is the victim

No player ever sees the real username — operators included. The gameplay is the same for everyone, and the server log keeps the real identity for moderation.

Features

• Every kind of death. Melee, bow, trident, tamed wolves, indirect deaths such as "tried to swim in lava to escape…". The plugin rewrites the message tree and never parses the sentence, so every death type and every client language works without a list of cases.
• Fixed-length obfuscation. Always the same width, whoever the killer is. A length that matched the real username would give it away on a server with few players online.
• No leak on hover. In vanilla, hovering a username shows the real name and UUID, and clicking it pre-fills /tell <name>. Both are stripped from the replacement.
• Custom weapon names too. A renamed sword can identify its owner just as well as a username. Obfuscated by default, switchable off.
• Offline killers covered. Hit someone, disconnect, and let them die of the fall — you stay anonymous for 60 seconds. Without this, quitting was a free bypass.
• Fail-closed. If anything throws while handling a death, the message is dropped rather than sent through. A bug must never leak a username — that is the one thing this plugin exists to prevent.
• Nothing else is touched. Chat, join and quit messages, advancements, the tab list and nametags all stay vanilla.

Configuration

Key	Default	What it does
obfuscated-length	8	Number of characters in the obfuscated text, 1–32. The same for every player.
filler-character	a	Base character. Minecraft swaps each character for a random glyph of the same width, so this setting fixes the width on screen.
obfuscate-weapon-name	true	Also obfuscate custom weapon names, which can give the killer away.
log-real-names	true	Write the real usernames of obfuscated players to the server log, for moderation.
telemetry	true	Send anonymous usage statistics. false turns every send off.
telemetry-host	https://eu.i.posthog.com	The PostHog instance the statistics are sent to. Change it to point at a self-hosted instance.

/anonymouspotion reload reloads the config in place — permission anonymouspotion.admin, operators by default.

Known limitations

• If the Invisibility effect expires while an arrow is in flight, the archer is named in plain text. The effect is read at the moment of death, not at the moment of the shot.
• Turning log-real-names off removes every trace of the killer: the server's own log shows the obfuscated name too, so the option does not merely trim moderation output, it removes it.
• The plugin rewrites the death message at HIGHEST priority. Another plugin that replaces the message with flat text, or that writes after this one, can bypass the obfuscation.

Telemetry

The plugin sends anonymous usage statistics to PostHog. Set telemetry: false in config.yml to turn it off.

What is sent: a random installation id generated on first start, four properties attached to every event, plus five events.

The four properties present on every event, whichever it is:

• app: the plugin's short name, always anonymouspotion. It tells this plugin apart from other projects sharing the same PostHog project.
• source: the server platform, always paper.
• mc_version: the server's Minecraft version, for example 1.21.11.
• component_version: the plugin version, for example 1.0.0.

The body also carries $ip set to null. That is not data — it is the instruction telling PostHog not to record the request's IP address, nor derive a geolocation from it. Without it, the server's public IP would be stored by the service.

The five events:

• plugin_enabled (on startup): server version, obfuscated-length, obfuscate-weapon-name, log-real-names, and the server's online mode (a server setting, not a plugin setting).
• death_obfuscated (each death where a name was obfuscated): how many names were obfuscated, whether a weapon name was actually obfuscated at that death, whether one of the killers was offline, and the kind of death (the vanilla translation key, never the rendered text).
• obfuscation_failed (if obfuscation fails): the Java exception type, never its message.
• command_used (each /anonymouspotion command): the subcommand used (reload).
• session_heartbeat (every 30 minutes): server uptime and how many deaths have been obfuscated since startup.

What is never sent: no usernames, no IP addresses, no player UUIDs, no message contents. This plugin exists to stop a username from leaking — it is not going to ship those same usernames somewhere else.

Requirements

Paper 1.21.x, Java 21. No dependencies.