TunnelVision | X-ray detection for CoreProtect

Why I built this
I don't like cheaters. Not because they "win", but because they steal everyone else's time: the players who mine by hand, and the volunteer moderators who end up dropping investigations for lack of proof.

For years I moderated a whitelisted survival server I also played on. I was tired of spending entire evenings checking players one by one in CoreProtect, over and over. So I built TunnelVision to automate the most tedious part of that work: moderators save time and find evidence more easily.

The problem

• Paper's anti-xray hides ores, but it can't see ores already exposed in caves, players who know the seed, or those who found a workaround. It's a lock, not a camera.
• CoreProtect logs everything, but you need to know what to look for, and on whom. An active server has millions of broken blocks.
• Ore/block ratios ("he mined 3% diamond, that's suspicious") collapse as soon as a player explores caves, and wrongly flag honest players.

Result: careful x-rayers slip through the net.

What TunnelVision does
TunnelVision reads the CoreProtect history your server already keeps. Nothing to install on the player side, no gameplay change.

1. Rebuilds every player's mining sessions, telling walking apart from actual digging.
2. Measures the trajectory: ore yield, detours between veins, and above all the turns that point straight at an ore that wasn't visible yet. The same signals an experienced moderator spots in a replay, measured on every session, not just the ones you already suspect.
3. Filters the noise: caves, geodes, surface harvesting, sessions too short to mean anything. A player picking up ore exposed in a cave is not a cheater, and the tool knows it.
4. Gives your moderators a ranked list: a 0-100 score per session, an explanation of every indicator, a 3D reconstruction of the session, and an in-game menu (/tunnelvision menu).

A real session, anonymized: 175 diamonds in just over 7 minutes, nearly 13 diamonds per 100 blocks dug. The tunnel heads straight down to diamond level, then chains 35 diamond veins one after the other. On the right, each indicator explains the score.

TunnelVision never bans anyone. It tells you where to look; a human always checks and decides. The goal is to catch cheaters, not unlucky players.

First server, first day: 9 bans
La Taverne is the first server to adopt TunnelVision. On the very first day, 9 players were banned after review by the moderation team. Every one of them had slipped through the net until then: not clumsy cheaters who would have been caught anyway, but precisely the careful ones nobody had thought to check.

Important: how it works (data disclosure)
TunnelVision is a plugin + hosted analysis service. The analysis does not run on your game server (so it doesn't cost you TPS): the plugin sends part of your CoreProtect history to the TunnelVision API and queries it for scores and reports.

• Sent: block break/place history only: player username + UUID, coordinates, world, block type, action, timestamp.
• Never sent: chat, private messages, commands, inventories, statistics, player IP addresses, CoreProtect metadata blobs.
• Storage: an isolated space per server, never shared between servers, automatically purged after 90 days.
• Your CoreProtect database is opened strictly read-only. The plugin never modifies or deletes anything in it.

Full details: privacy page.

Requirements

• Paper or Spigot 1.21.x, 26.1 or 26.2
• CoreProtect with its default SQLite database
• An API key: TunnelVision is currently in free beta for small servers, with limited spots. Request access or ask on Discord.

Links

• Website and interactive 3D demo
• Documentation
• Discord

If you're tired of playing detective in CoreProtect while cheaters walk away with the diamonds, give it a try.