Skirmish

Skirmish

An escape tool and a combat lock, for servers where loot can be taken.

Free and open source. Paper 1.21+. No dependencies, no database, no economy hook.

Two mechanics that only make sense together:

• The Blink Feather — right-click to step up to 20 blocks along your line of sight, on a cooldown.
• The combat lock — while you are fighting you cannot pearl, chorus or /home away.

A combat lock on its own is a punishment. An escape tool on its own is a way to never be caught. Together they say something specific: you may not leave a fight, but you may always try to survive one.

The Blink Feather

Right-click and you are twenty blocks away — behind the pillar, on the roof, across the ravine.

It cannot cross a wall. The ray stops at the first block a body cannot occupy, so it can never put someone inside a base, a vault or a locked room — regardless of what protection plugin you run, or whether you run one at all. This is geometry, not a permission check.

It refuses instead of killing you. Aim across a ravine and there is no floor within reach, so the blink is declined rather than dropping you twenty blocks. A movement tool that can kill you is one nobody presses at four hearts, which is the only moment it is for.

A refusal costs nothing. No landing means no cooldown spent. A tool that eats its cooldown on a failed activation fails at exactly the moment somebody needed it.

It lands you as far as it can reach, not one step in. Look at a rooftop eighteen blocks off and you arrive on the rooftop.

Both ends draw a puff and play a note. Deliberate: a pursuer has to be able to follow. An escape nobody can track is a disappearance, and the chase is the point.

The combat lock

Any hit between two players puts both in combat for a configurable window. Ender pearls, chorus fruit and teleport commands are refused while tagged, and an action bar shows the seconds remaining — a player who cannot see the timer experiences a refused teleport as a broken command rather than as a rule.

The feather is exempt, and that is not a hole: it is bounded by its range, it cannot cross a wall, it leaves a visible trail at both ends, and it costs a cooldown. None of that is true of a pearl chain.

Mobs do not tag you by default. On a server full of hostile mobs that would be a near-permanent lock — a worse bug than the one it fixes. Turn it on deliberately for boss or raid events.

Commands

• /skirmish give [player] — mint a Blink Feather
• /skirmish reload — re-read the config

Permissions: skirmish.admin for both commands (default: op), and skirmish.bypass to teleport freely while in combat (default: false).

Configuration

blink:
  range: 20            # clamped 3..64
  cooldown-ticks: 100  # floored at 20
combat:
  seconds: 15          # clamped 3..120
  block-teleports: true
  mobs-tag-you: false

Pick range against your arenas, not against a feeling. The blink should cross most of a fighting space and never the whole of it. At 20 blocks in a 26-wide room, an escape moves you out of reach while leaving your pursuer in the same fight. Set it wider than your arenas and the tool stops being a decision.

Compatibility

One jar runs on Paper 1.21 through current. The single API that differs across that range — the teleport cause for chorus fruit, CHORUS_FRUIT on 1.21.x and CONSUMABLE_EFFECT from 26.2 — is matched by name rather than by enum constant. Item markers go on through editMeta, available since 1.14, for the same reason. Built and tested against Paper 26.2.

Source

https://github.com/Vexoris/skirmish

The decision about where a blink lands lives in BlinkPlan: no Bukkit type in it at all, and covered by its own test suite. The listener only supplies what the world says and performs the consequences. That split is why the safety properties — cannot pass a wall, refuses over a void, never lands you inside a block — are proven offline rather than asserted in a comment, and the tests are written so a no-op implementation fails them.

GPL-3.0-or-later.