ChatActivities

ChatActivities runs games in chat on a timer. It posts a question, and the first player to type the correct answer wins whatever rewards you configure.

Nine game types ship with it, from hand-written trivia to generated word puzzles and arithmetic. Everything is configurable: the questions, how strictly answers are matched, how often games run, what winning gives you, and every line of text players see.

• Five generated game types plus your own hand-written questions
• Whole question banks in one entry so a large trivia pool does not swamp your other games
• Flexible answer matching with exact, contains, regex or fuzzy modes, and typo tolerance
• Progressive hints that reveal the answer gradually and never give it away completely
• Reward commands run from console or as the winner, with placeholder support
• Win statistics with a leaderboard and fastest-time tracking, stored in SQLite
• PlaceholderAPI in both directions: use %placeholders% in rewards, and expose %chatactivities_...% to your scoreboards and holograms
• Players can opt out with a single command if they would rather not see the games
• MiniMessage formatting throughout, with optional sounds, titles and action bars
• A developer API with four events so other plugins can filter, redirect or react

1. Drop the jar into your plugins folder
2. Restart the server
3. Edit plugins/ChatActivities/games.yml and config.yml
4. Run /ca reload

Requirements

• Paper 26.2
• Java 25 or newer

Optional

• PlaceholderAPI, if you want to use %placeholders% in reward commands or show ChatActivities stats in other plugins

Java 25 is required. Paper 26.2 needs it too, so this plugin cannot run on anything older. Run java -version to check before you install.

The first time the plugin starts it downloads one extra file it needs for saving statistics, around 12 MB. This is automatic and happens only once, but your server needs internet access for it. Without it the plugin will not start.

A game is either static (you write the question and its answers) or generated (a type: produces both fresh each round).

A static question

games:
  capital-france:
    question: "<gold>Quick!</gold> <white>What is the capital of France?"
    answers: [ "paris" ]
    notification: trivia
    timeout: 30s
    commands:
      - "console: say {player} knew it in {time}!"

A whole trivia bank in one entry

Prefer this over one game per question. A hundred separate entries would crowd out every other game when selection is weighted.

  general-trivia:
    type: random-trivia
    question: "<gold>Trivia:</gold> <white>{question}"
    pool:
      - q: "Which mob explodes when it gets close to you?"
        a: [ "creeper" ]
      - q: "What is the strongest vanilla armour material?"
        a: netherite          # a single answer needs no brackets

Arithmetic

mode picks the flavour: expression, square, root or percent. Division is always exact, so answers are never fractions.

  quick-maths:
    type: math
    question: "<yellow>Solve:</yellow> <white>{problem}"
    mode: expression
    operations: [ add, subtract, multiply, divide ]
    operands: "2-25"
    terms: 2

Main command is /chatactivities, with /chatact and /ca as aliases.

Viewing another player's stats needs chatactivities.stats.other (op by default). Each game also registers chatactivities.receive.<notification>, granted to everyone by default. Revoke it to hide a particular category of game from a group.

Three files, all reloadable with /ca reload. A malformed game is reported by name in the console and skipped, so one bad entry never stops the rest from loading.

config.yml holds timing, matching, hints, rewards and storage.

timing:
  interval: 300s        # base delay between games
  variance: 60s         # actual delay is the interval plus or minus this
  timeout: 45s          # how long players have to answer
  min-players: 2        # below this, the scheduler waits

selection:
  mode: weighted        # random | weighted
  avoid-repeat: 3       # don't replay any of the last N games

matching:
  mode: exact           # exact | contains | regex | fuzzy
  fuzzy-tolerance: 1    # how many typos to forgive

Matching is always case-insensitive. There is deliberately no option for it.

Hints reveal the answer a little at a time, and are capped so the final character is always hidden. Answers shorter than min-answer-length get no hints at all, because on a two-character answer even the first hint would hand it over.

Rewards accept a console: or player: prefix and the placeholders {player}, {uuid}, {game}, {answer} and {time}. default-commands run when a game defines none of its own; always-commands run on every win regardless.

games.yml holds the games, messages.yml every line of text, in MiniMessage format. Any message can also carry a sound, title, subtitle, action bar or boss bar.

Using placeholders. If PlaceholderAPI is installed, %placeholders% from any expansion are resolved in reward commands. This applies to reward commands only, not to messages.yml or to game questions.

Providing placeholders. Other plugins can read these:

Values come from a cache that refreshes on a configurable interval, so scoreboards asking many times a second never touch the database.

Four events, all on the main thread.

ChatActivityBroadcastEvent is the integration point for chat management plugins. It carries the message, the game, its notification tag and the recipients, all of which you can change.

Writing a separate plugin against this API is explicitly permitted by the licence, and your plugin remains entirely your own.

Licence: All Rights Reserved. You may run ChatActivities on any server you operate. You may not redistribute, modify or resell it.

If you encounter any issues, message me on Discord @escyth.