VoicePhysics

A server plugin for Simple Voice Chat on Paper, Purpur, Folia and Spigot (Minecraft 1.16.5 – 26.3) that makes proximity voice chat realistic: voices are muffled behind walls for every player, sound zones change how far a voice carries, and game rules decide who hears whom.

Players need nothing beyond Simple Voice Chat — server-side wall occlusion, zones and game rules work for vanilla-with-SVC clients out of the box. Players who also install the Voice Physics client mod get custom fade curves, presets, doorway corners, cave echo, a HUD and a voice radar.

What players hear

• 🧱 Walls — voices behind walls are quieter and duller, and a whisper is lost behind a wall sooner than a shout. CPU load is capped (server_walls_max_streams), and on any error the original audio packet is sent untouched, so voice chat never goes silent.
• 🏛️ Sound zones — a stage heard twice as far, a quiet library, a soundproof room, a cathedral with echo. Everyone sees the zone's name above the hotbar on entering.
• 🌊 Realism without the client mod (off by default) — dull voices under water, far voices covered by rain and thunder, echo in caves, wind high up, a quieter voice behind the speaker's back, the Doppler effect and the server profile's distance curve.
• 🎙️ Player controls (/voice) — lets any player talk quietly or shout, turn walls off for themselves, adjust individual players' volume and see who is talking nearby. Clickable in chat, with an inventory menu and undo.
• 💿 Music & radio addons — works cleanly alongside custom music disc / jukebox addons (music_physics switch) and leaves walkie-talkies and radio speakers untouched.

Tools for admins

• Zones — draw a box in game with /vcd zone, or bind a whole world, a WorldGuard region (vcd-zone flag or zone.region.*), a Towny town or a Lands land.
• Game rules — sneaking is quieter, the dead are silent until respawn, spectators talk only to each other, and a goat horn (or any item) works as a directional megaphone that sounds like one.
• Fair play — offer or lock the server's audio settings for players with the client mod, and turn off their monitor and radar so nobody sees through walls in PvP or hide-and-seek.
• Require the client mod — send a clickable download link, remind on every join, or kick.
• Voice moderation & chat-mute sync — /vcd mute <player> [time] [reason], /vcd unmute, /vcd mutes, plus optional automatic voice-mute sync with EssentialsX, LiteBans, LibertyBans and AdvancedBan.
• PlaceholderAPI — %vcd_mode%, %vcd_talking%, %vcd_zone%, %vcd_muted%, %vcd_range% and more for scoreboards, tab lists and chat formats.
• Extras (off by default, /vcd extras) — frequency radio (/voice radio), placed loudspeakers (/vcd speaker add), an eavesdrop spyglass, sculk / warden reactions to shouts, server doorway sound, and LuckPerms contexts (vcd:mode, vcd:walls, vcd:zone) + chat-mute sync.
• Clickable /vcd & in-game Server tab — every /vcd command has clickable buttons, undo (/vcd undo), a change log (/vcd log), /vcd debug <player> to inspect who hears whom and why, and messages in 7 languages. Admins who run the client mod can toggle everything from its Server tab.

Install

1. Put voice-physics-bukkit-*.jar into plugins/ alongside Simple Voice Chat.
2. Restart the server. Settings live in plugins/VoicePhysics/vc-audio-distance-server.properties and can all be changed live with /vcd.

• Platforms: Paper, Purpur, Folia (folia-supported: true), Spigot, Bukkit — one jar for Minecraft 1.16.5 – 26.3 (Java 8+ on 1.16.5, Java 17+ on 1.18+).
• Permissions: vcd.status, vcd.settings, vcd.zone, vcd.debug, vcd.mute, vcd.speaker, vcd.admin (operators have all by default); vcd.voice (default true) for /voice.
• Statistics: sends anonymous server counts to bStats (no player names, IPs, chat or voice). Set metrics=false in plugins/VoicePhysics/vc-audio-distance-server.properties to disable.

All settings, commands and permissions → · Changelog · Questions and problems · Report a bug