StormCourts

StormCourts

Adds accusations, evidence, trials, warrants, bounties, sentences, and managed prison worlds to Paper roleplay servers.

StormCourts is a roleplay-first justice plugin for survival and RPG servers. Players can file accusations, attach evidence, opt into courtroom roles, vote on trials, issue warrants, sentence guilty players, and serve time in a managed jail world.

It is designed for servers where villages, crimes, bounties, guards, and court decisions should become part of live gameplay instead of only staff moderation.

Features

• Player accusation flow through /accuse and /court accuse.
• Automatic nearby evidence scanning with /accuse auto or /accuse unknown.
• Court cases with accuser, accused, judge, jurors, prosecutor, defence, evidence, verdict, and sentence state.
• Player opt-in roles for judges, jurors, prosecutors, and defence.
• Jury voting with guilty and not-guilty outcomes.
• Villager fallback court flow when staffed player trials cannot form.
• Court holding for captured players before verdict and sentencing.
• Warrant issuing and revocation.
• Combat arrest flow where wanted players can be captured instead of killed.
• Per-village bounty records for village offences.
• /bounty [all] for players to view their active village bounties.
• Automatic village enforcement for repeated village block damage, theft from village containers, villager attacks, and iron golem attacks.
• Configurable bounty thresholds, fine values, hunter waves, cooldowns, and enforcement rules.
• Wilderness bounty hunters for high-bounty wanted players.
• NPC-linked guards, bounty hunters, archers, iron mercenaries, and diamond mercenaries when NPCs is installed.
• Finite pursuit waves so defeated hunters are not replaced endlessly.
• Pursuit rest cooldowns after active squads are defeated.
• Last-known-position tracking so pursuit NPCs do not perfectly track players through walls and caves.
• Underground, Nether, End, and cross-world pursuit safeguards.
• Defeatable linked enforcement NPCs, with configurable bounty increases for killing court-linked guards or hunters.
• Managed court world with courtroom and holding cell.
• Managed jail world with cell rows, guard room, overflow holding, lighting, beds, and optional mob prisoners for atmosphere.
• Jail sentences with safe custody handling, command restrictions, escape protection, logout recovery, and expiry release.
• Jail beds let prisoners sleep for sentence credit without skipping the world to daytime.
• Jail world time stays locked to night so sleep-based sentence credit remains usable.
• Fine and restitution sentence support through StormEconomy.
• Temporary permission restriction support through ThunderPerms.
• Freeze, mute, community service, inventory escrow, reputation, exile, and ban-style sentence records.
• Severe punishments such as inventory seizure, exile, ban, and reputation penalties are disabled by default.
• Staff reversal and release shortcuts for live court clean-up.
• Reversed jail sentences close the source case, revoke active warrants, clear related bounties, and release the prisoner safely.
• BlockLedger reconstruction integration for court cases.
• Court reconstructions are prepared first and only viewed when an authorised player explicitly joins or views them.
• CoreProtect evidence lookup support when CoreProtect is installed.
• SQLite storage by default, with optional MySQL and MariaDB support.
• Async/debounced saves and runtime indexes for active warrants, sentences, jail assignments, and pursuit state.
• Bukkit service API for other plugins to inspect cases, active warrants, active sentences, jail status, clean-record status, and storage health.
• Optional Bukkit events for court integrations.
• Admin backup, save, reload, status, warrant, sentencing, reversal, bounty, jail, and reconstruction commands.

Court Flow

A typical case starts when a player files an accusation:

• /accuse <player|auto|unknown> <reason>
• /court accuse <player|auto|unknown> <reason>

Cases can include player statements, BlockLedger references, BlockLedger entries, or CoreProtect evidence. Players may opt into courtroom roles, then a judge and jury can hear the case, vote, and sentence the accused if the verdict is guilty.

If a staffed player court cannot form, StormCourts can fall back to a visible villager hearing flow so village enforcement can still resolve cases without requiring staff to be online.

Village Bounties

StormCourts can turn repeated village harm into enforceable bounties.

Tracked behaviour includes:

• Village block damage.
• Theft from village containers.
• Villager attacks.
• Iron golem attacks.
• Killing court-linked enforcement NPCs.

Village bounty records can trigger warrants, fines, bounty hunters, mercenaries, and optional StormContracts bounty postings. Bounties can also be cleared on not-guilty verdicts, releases, and staff reversals.

Warrants And Pursuits

Warrants let court enforcement capture wanted players through gameplay.

When NPCs is installed, StormCourts can spawn linked pursuit NPCs such as:

• Hunter
• Archer
• Guard
• Mercenary
• Elite Mercenary

Pursuits use configurable squad sizes, attack ranges, damage values, cooldowns, tracking memory, underground suppression, and finite wave behaviour. Missing NPCs support does not disable courts, jail, or sentencing; visual enforcement is skipped cleanly.

Jail And Sentencing

StormCourts generates and manages a jail world for active custody.

Supported sentence records include:

• Jail
• Fine
• Restitution
• Mute
• Freeze
• Permission restriction
• Community service
• Inventory seizure
• Reputation
• Exile
• Ban

The default public-server setup is conservative. Jail, fines, and temporary restrictions are available, while severe punishment types are disabled unless an admin explicitly enables them.

Jail cells include beds, and jailed players can sleep to receive accelerated sentence credit. Sleeping does not turn the jail world to day; the jail world remains locked at night.

Managed Worlds

StormCourts can create:

• stormcourts_court
• stormcourts_jail

These worlds are built for court and custody gameplay. StormCourts protects them from unsafe behaviour such as hostile griefing, explosions, portals, unsafe teleports, escape commands, block edits, and custody abuse. Players stranded in managed court or jail worlds without active custody are returned safely.

Commands

Main command:

• /court

Aliases:

• /courts
• /stormcourts

Shortcuts:

• /accuse <player|auto|unknown> <reason>
• /bounty [all]

Common player commands:

• /court accuse <player|auto|unknown> <reason>
• /court bounty [player|here]
• /court optin <judge|juror|prosecutor|defence> [on|off]
• /court evidence <case> statement|ledgercase|ledgerentry|coreprotect <text|id>
• /court trial start|auto <case>
• /court vote <case> guilty|not_guilty
• /court status
• /court jail

Judge and staff commands:

• /court warrant issue <case> [reason]
• /court warrant revoke <case> [reason]
• /court sentence <case> <type> [details]
• /court reverse [me|player|sentence-uuid]
• /court release [me|player]
• /court reconstruction start|stop|join|leave <case>

Admin commands:

• /court bounty clear <player>
• /court save
• /court backup
• /court reload

Permissions

Normal player permissions are granted by default through stormcourts.defaults.

Player permissions:

• stormcourts.command
• stormcourts.accuse
• stormcourts.evidence
• stormcourts.optin
• stormcourts.status
• stormcourts.vote
• stormcourts.judge
• stormcourts.defend
• stormcourts.prosecute

Admin permissions:

• stormcourts.admin
• stormcourts.admin.command
• stormcourts.admin.status
• stormcourts.admin.warrant
• stormcourts.admin.sentence
• stormcourts.admin.appeal
• stormcourts.admin.bounty
• stormcourts.admin.reload
• stormcourts.admin.save
• stormcourts.admin.backup
• stormcourts.reconstruction

Special testing bypass:

• stormcourts.admin.bypass

stormcourts.admin.bypass is not bundled into the normal admin permission by default, so staff can live-test custody, jail, guards, bounty hunters, and release flows without accidentally bypassing them.

Storage

StormCourts supports:

• SQLite
• MySQL
• MariaDB

SQLite is the default. MySQL and MariaDB can be enabled for larger servers using the shared storage configuration format.

StormCourts stores court cases, evidence, warrants, sentences, jail assignments, prisoner records, player court profiles, village bounty records, audit records, and runtime recovery data.

Optional Integrations

StormCourts works as a standalone court and jail plugin, but it can use other plugins when available.

• BlockLedger can provide ledger evidence and court reconstruction sessions.
• CoreProtect can provide lookup evidence without becoming a hard dependency.
• NPCs can provide visible judges, jurors, guards, bounty hunters, archers, and mercenaries.
• StormEconomy enables fines and restitution.
• ThunderPerms enables temporary permission restriction sentences.
• CommandFoundry improves command and teleport compatibility around custody flows.
• VillageMemory helps connect village crimes to persistent village identity.
• VillagePolitics can allow allied villages to participate in enforcement.
• Alignments can record negative village behaviour when installed.
• StormFactions, StormQuests, and StormContracts can hook into court, bounty, quest, and contract gameplay.

All integrations are optional. Missing plugins degrade cleanly instead of disabling the core court system.

Notes

StormCourts is built for survival and RPG servers that want justice systems to be playable. It gives players a reason to accuse, defend, vote, chase, surrender, appeal, pay fines, serve time, and return to normal gameplay.

The plugin is not just a punishment menu. It creates a full loop around crimes, evidence, trials, warrants, bounties, NPC enforcement, jail time, and release, while keeping dangerous punishments disabled by default for safer public-server operation.