lasersenigma

Lasers Enigma — Free and open-source light puzzle editor

Lasers Enigma is a free, open-source Spigot/Paper plugin that turns Minecraft into a full-featured light-puzzle game and editor. Players redirect colored laser beams using mirrors, prisms, filters, gravitational spheres, a portal gun and more to solve levels. Designers compose those components into anything from a beginner's one-mirror tutorial to massive multi-room adventures.

Whether you want to host community puzzles on your server, build your own original maps, or play through ready-made levels with friends, Lasers Enigma gives you the toolbox.

Active project — regular updates, 180+ community-made levels available for download.

✦ Try before you install

A free public test server runs the latest plugin build at play.lasers-enigma.eu with 180+ community-made levels to play right now. Anyone can also build new puzzles directly on the server: once published, they become playable by every other visitor and downloadable from any server in the world.

→ The fastest way to know if Lasers Enigma is the right fit for your server is to log in and play for ten minutes.

✦ Three pillars

🧠 Solve

Give your players fun, replayable, brain-bending challenges — alone or in groups. The built-in automatic reset brings every puzzle back to its initial state when no player is left inside, so a level remains playable forever without admin intervention.

🎨 Design

Assemble modular, orientable and colourable components to manipulate the flow of light. Configure victory conditions, sound and visual atmosphere with precision — every puzzle is built entirely in-game. Admins keep config.yml for server-wide tuning, but no file editing is required to design a puzzle.

🔗 Share

Copy your puzzles to other locations within the game, export schematics to other servers, or upload them to share with the community — and pull any community-made puzzle directly into your own server in one click.

✦ Use it for more than puzzles

Lasers Enigma is built around puzzles, but most of its building blocks are useful anywhere on a server — adventure maps, MMORPG worlds, minigame lobbies, even PVP arenas:

• Wireless redstone replacement — the condition engine drives doors, pistons and contraptions from any in-game state, with no repeaters and no command blocks.
• Locked rewards & VIP areas — the Lock & key chest turns into a clean access-control system for quest endings, member-only rooms or scavenger hunts.
• Hidden passages and secret rooms — Conditional appearing_ / disappearing blocks_ let you pop staircases and walls in and out without any command block.
• Ambient lasers — coloured beams that sweep, cycle and pulse — perfect for nightclubs, concert halls, futuristic spawns or any decorative build.
• Background music — the Music Block plays custom Note Block Studio songs tied to player presence, condition or schedule.
• A Portal Gun playground at spawn or in a minigame area — momentum-preserving teleportation is fun on its own, no puzzle required.

If you've ever wanted "a switch that opens a door when 3 specific players are in this room", "a hidden chest revealed only after collecting 5 keys", or "a stage with sweeping coloured lights" — you can build it in-game in a few minutes.

✦ What's in the box

Puzzle components

Every component can be placed on the floor, walls or ceiling. Full component reference →

• Laser sender — emits a colored laser; rotatable, can be conditional or redstone-driven.
• Laser receiver — activates when hit by a matching color; outputs a redstone signal. Rotatable; can be configured to either stop the incoming laser or let it pass through.
• Concentrator — redirects incoming lasers and combines their colors before re-emitting. Rotatable.
• Prism — decomposes secondary and white lasers into their constituent colors.
• Mirror support — holds a colored, white or black mirror at any orientation. Hit the face: the laser is reflected. Slide along the edge: the laser passes through and is only filtered. A black mirror duplicates the light.
• Mirror block — a full-block mirror (Minecraft concrete powder) that reflects matching colors.
• Mirror chest — gives players mirrors, and optionally the Portal Gun, inside a puzzle.
• Filtering sphere — holds a mirror; filters incoming lasers based on the mirror's color.
• Reflecting sphere — holds a mirror; reflects matching colors back in all directions.
• Gravitational sphere — attracts or repels lasers within a configurable radius.
• Glass and glass panes — colored stained glass that filters laser beams.
• Burnable block — destroyed when hit by the right laser color.
• Laser solidifier — turns a laser's path into a solid trail of colored glass. Can be conditional.
• Conditional appearing / disappearing block — appears or disappears when its condition is met (great for hidden doors and opening passages).
• Conditional redstone block — turns into a redstone block when its condition is met, driving vanilla redstone contraptions.
• Redstone sensor — feeds external redstone signals back into the condition system.
• Lock and key chest — a locked mechanism that opens once the matching keys are collected from key chests scattered around the puzzle.
• Elevator and call button — a moving cabin that travels between floors on player input. Can be conditional.
• Bonus — collectible reward, tracked per run and globally.
• Music block — plays a custom song from the server's song library. Can be conditional.
• Portal surface — quartz blocks and stairs on which the Portal Gun can place portals.
• Leaderboard — in-world ranking of players across 15 different criteria.

Portal Gun

A first-person teleportation item that turns any portal surface into a portal: left-click drops the primary portal, right-click drops the secondary, and walking or falling through one teleports the player to the other while preserving the entry speed. Aim portals on facing floors and ceilings to build infinite-momentum loops, or on walls for tight corridor travel. In multiplayer, every player gets their own unique color pair so puzzles stay solvable with friends in the same area. Lasers themselves can also be routed through portals — opening up light-storage and re-routing puzzles impossible to build with mirrors alone.

A real color system

Primary (red/green/blue), secondary (yellow/magenta/cyan) and white lasers — combine, decompose with prisms, filter through stained glass, partial-reflect with colored mirrors, duplicate with black mirrors. Configurable strict or lenient color matching.

Color-blind friendly info tool

The /le info command gives players an info item: aim it at any component, laser beam, or compatible block to read its name, color and current state directly in the chat — no need to rely on the visual color alone. With the optional MapEngine plugin, an in-world Venn-diagram color wheel is also displayed in front of the player to show how the color decomposes into its primary parts. Designed to keep puzzles solvable for color-blind players without compromising the visuals for everyone else.

Wireless-redstone-style condition engine

Components and area victories use a powerful condition system with multiple modes:

• Laser receiver — number of activated receivers in the area.
• Players — number of players currently in the area.
• Redstone sensor — number of redstone-powered sensors in the area.
• Lock — number of opened locks in the area.
• Time — seconds elapsed since the first player entered the area.
• Bonus — unique bonuses collected in the area during the current run.
• Server bonus — best lifetime bonus count among the players currently in the area, accumulated across every area they've ever won.
• Specific component state — mirrors another component's activation state (with optional inversion). Supported targets: laser receiver, lock, bonus, burnable block, conditional appearing/disappearing/redstone block, elevator, music block, laser solidifier, redstone sensor.
• Always activated — keeps a laser sender or solidifier permanently active.
• Redstone — drives a laser sender or solidifier from a vanilla redstone signal (lever, button, pressure plate…).
• Victory area — for area victories only: players win only if they exit through a designated victory zone.

Each numeric mode supports min/max ranges (with optional ∞ upper bound). It can replace most wireless-redstone needs without a single repeater or command block.

Player progression & stats

• Per-area, per-player and server-wide statistics (duration, steps, actions, bonuses).
• Personal records and puzzle records, with anti-cheat tainted-run detection (records require solo runs).
• 15-criteria Leaderboard component for in-world rankings.
• Persistent victory message with first-victory celebration.
• /le stats commands for player, area and server stats.

Checkpoints

Set per-area respawn points so players who die or disconnect mid-puzzle reappear inside the area instead of being kicked back to the world spawn. Victory checkpoints are automatically promoted as the new spawnpoint when a player wins, smoothing progression across multi-puzzle maps.

Scheduled actions

Animate components on a timer: sweep coloured beams across a hall like a nightclub or concert light show, cycle a stage's laser colors on the beat, build a rhythm-based puzzle. Available on every component that supports the relevant action — no command blocks needed.

Sync between components

Pair two components so they share state automatically: rotation (horizontal, vertical, or both), mirror placement and color, or gravitational sphere strength. Move one mirror — its synced twin moves with it. Perfect for symmetric puzzles, mirrored mechanisms or coordinated multi-laser challenges, with no redstone or commands required.

Schematics & copy/paste

Build it once, deploy it everywhere. Copy and paste full areas or individual components in-game, save them as schematics, and reload them on any other location, world or server you administer. Schematics can also be downloaded from the Lasers Enigma website — fetch a community puzzle directly with /lasers schematic download <name> (with tab-completion suggesting all available puzzles).

Integrations

• BetonQuest — native conditions, events and objectives to weave puzzles into quest systems.

Vanilla command compatibility

Every command accepts standard Minecraft selectors (@a, @p, @e[...]) and relative coordinates (~, ^), and participates correctly in /execute at|as chains — drop Lasers Enigma into your existing command-block, datapack or BetonQuest setup without friction.

Permissions

Fine-grained permission nodes (lasers.edit, lasers.admin, …) let you control who can build puzzles, manage areas or use admin commands. Plays nicely with WorldGuard and most plot/region plugins, so you can let your players freely create puzzles inside their own claims while keeping the rest of the world locked down.

Highly configurable

A single config.yml exposes everything an admin might want to tweak: which materials a laser can pass through, the colors and brightness of every laser type, laser-on-player damage and effects, the active language, song playback, and more. On top of that, per-area settings (accessible in-game via the Area Configuration menu) let puzzle creators allow or deny specific player interactions — rotating mirror supports, concentrators, laser senders or laser receivers, resizing gravitational spheres, using the info item — without touching any file.

Performance

Lasers Enigma is only active when players are in levels — empty puzzle areas cost almost nothing. **Battle-tested for years on the **public test server under live community traffic.

No resource pack required

Lasers Enigma works out of the box with vanilla Minecraft assets — no resource pack to ship to your players. If you want a different look (a more "fantasy" feel, for example), you can still apply a custom resource pack to override the visuals without breaking anything.

Storage

SQLite by default, MySQL supported. All data lives under /plugins/LasersEnigma/.

License

Lasers Enigma is published under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0. You can freely use, share, modify and redistribute the plugin for any non-commercial purpose, with attribution. The non-commercial clause is a deliberate choice to keep the plugin permanently free for community servers, schools, adventure-map creators and friends-only worlds — and to prevent it from being repackaged or paywalled as a paid feature on monetized networks.

A small note of honesty: we describe the plugin as "open-source" throughout this page, but strictly speaking CC BY-NC isn't an OSI-approved open-source license because of its non-commercial clause. Apologies for the shortcut — for the vast majority of users (community servers, modders, map makers, contributors), the practical experience is the same: the source is public, you can read it, fork it, build with it. Even the levels are free and downloadable.

That said, we're open to discussion: if you'd still like to use the plugin in a commercial context or without attribution, reach out on Discord and we'll evaluate case by case whether we can grant you a tailored license.

25 built-in languages

English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, French, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, German, Korean, Portuguese (BR), Japanese, Turkish, Polish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Czech, Ukrainian, Greek, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Romanian — with per-player language preference (/le lang <language>) and an open process to add your own.

✦ Free resources

• :electric_plug: The plugin — open-source, works on any modern Spigot/Paper server.
• :puzzle_piece: Downloadable levels — community-made puzzles, ready to import in-game.
• :dividers: Server pack — a pre-configured server to get started in minutes.
• :video_game: Test server — connect to play.lasers-enigma.eu to try it before installing.

✦ Links

Documentation · Support & Community Discord · Source code · SpigotMC · Modrinth

More info, screenshots and tutorials at lasers-enigma.eu.

🚀 Ready to install?

1. Download the plugin and its dependencies.
2. Drop the plugin's .jar in your plugins/ folder, alongside WorldEdit and NoteblockAPI.
3. Restart the server and run /lasers in-game.
4. Five minutes later, your first laser puzzle is up and running. (Step-by-step guide.)

🎥 First-puzzle walkthrough

If you want a guided walkthrough of building a basic laser puzzle from scratch: