ManhuntStar

🏹 ManhuntStar

ManHunt hunter bots for Paper. No friends online? Spawn a pack of hunters that play like real players and try to stop you from beating the game.

They run, jump, swim, dig, build towers and bridges, fight with weapon cooldowns, crits and shields, eat, get stronger through phases, use ender pearls, crossbows, tridents, lava buckets, horses (with spear charges), boats and elytra, and follow you to the Nether and the End.

Server-side only: players don't need to install anything.

🎯 Quick start

1. Put the jar in your server's plugins/ folder and start the server (Paper 26.2 or 26.3, Java 25).
2. Join as an operator and run /manhunt create Hunter 3 (or open /manhunt menu). Three hunters appear in a ring around you.
3. Walk out of the ring. A countdown starts, with a bar at the top of the screen and 3-2-1 titles.
4. When it ends, the hunters come after you. Run!

Use /manhunt pause and /manhunt resume to stop and continue the hunt, and /manhunt remove all confirm to clear every bot.

✨ Features

They move like players

• Towering, bridging, digging, swimming and parkour to reach you
• Ender pearls to close the distance
• Horses, boats (they cross lakes when that's faster) and elytra
• Bots far from every player keep moving and chasing

They fight like players

• Melee with weapon cooldowns, crits and shields
• Sharp aim with bows, crossbows, tridents and firework crossbows: they lead moving targets and don't waste shots when a block is in the way
• Spear charges on horseback; on foot they switch to swords
• Lava buckets, eating, golden apples and putting out fires with water
• Gear that gets better through phases as the hunt goes on
• Four difficulties: easy, medium, hard and terminator

A real ManHunt match

• Bots wait in a ring; the head-start countdown only begins when a player leaves it
• Pause freezes every bot and every timer, even across a server restart
• Late joiners can be hunted, protected for a while or left out
• Allowlist or blocklist of who can be hunted
• Groups with roles (hunters or escapers) and enemy groups that fight each other

They look like players

• Shown in TAB with skin and ping, counted in the server list and in /list
• "Joined/left the game" and vanilla death messages
• Skins from any Mojang account, from a .png file or the default robot skin
• Optional glow on hunters and escapers, in the color you choose
• Hostile mobs attack the bots too (with an exception list)

Easy to run

• A chest menu (/manhunt menu) for the match, the hunt rules, the bots and every setting
• Everything can be changed in game, and is commented in config.yml
• Bots, groups and gear come back after a restart
• Light on the server: in testing, 40 bots fighting each other kept the server at about 3 ms per tick (the limit is 50 ms)

⚙️ Commands

Everything lives under /manhunt and needs the manhuntstar.admin permission (operators have it by default). Tab completion covers every command, option and value.

🌍 Languages

Comes in English (default), Português (Brasil), Français, Русский and 简体中文. Every message and the whole menu are translated; commands and config.yml keys stay in English.

Change it with /manhunt settings language pt-br or in the menu, and it switches right away.

Translating it into your language:

1. Copy plugins/ManhuntStar/lang/en.yml to a new file in the same folder, for example es.yml.
2. Translate the texts between quotes, keeping the tags in <...> (like <bot>, <player>, <red>).
3. Run /manhunt reload, then /manhunt settings language es.

Anything you leave out falls back to English, so you can translate a little at a time. Want your translation in the plugin? Send it on GitHub.

⚠️ Good to know

• Other plugins that look for players (for example another ManHunt plugin's compass) don't see the bots: they show up in TAB, in /list and in the player count, but they aren't real players.
• Bot and group names in the menu are typed in chat.

🙏 Credits

Based on the Fabric mod T* (Terminator Star) by OpaleMC (CC0): the behavior was studied in the mod and rewritten from scratch for the Paper API, with fixes and optimizations.

Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue on GitHub. If you like ManhuntStar, a ⭐ on GitHub helps a lot!