Heartbeat

Hold the relic. They can hear your heartbeat.

Twelve relics exist on your server. Only twelve. Each one makes its holder, the Bearer, dangerously powerful. Every few minutes the Bearer's heartbeat goes out, and every Hunter's Compass on the server swings to point at them.

Other "one-per-server item" plugins stop at rare item. Heartbeat is built around the hunt.

How it plays

1. A relic awakens somewhere in the world. The whole server sees a title, a pillar of light and rough coordinates.
2. Someone claims it and becomes the Bearer: a passive, a right-click ability, and a weakness.
3. Every 4 minutes their heartbeat goes out. Hunter's Compasses lock onto where they stood. The Bearer gets a 10-second warning: a quickening heartbeat and a red pulse at the edge of the screen.
4. A hunter kills the Bearer and gets an Awakening Map, not the relic. The relic goes dark and reappears 10 minutes later at a spot only the map shows. Five minutes out, the rest of the server gets a rough region, and the race is on.
5. The longer a relic is held, the bigger its bounty, paid to whoever finally takes it down.

The 12 relics

Every number is in relics.yml. No ability can one-shot a player in full armor, and abilities respect PvP flags, WorldGuard regions and claim protection.

Dupe-proof by design

Every relic is tracked in a database, and copies are deleted automatically.

• Each relic carries a hidden ID and a generation number. Every move bumps the generation, so any older item is a copy and is deleted on sight, with an alert to staff.
• Every known dupe path is blocked: creative middle-click, hoppers and droppers, item frames, armor stands, allays, donkeys, shulkers, bundles, crafting grids, anvils.
• Crash-safe: a relic never moves until the database has saved the move. Kill the server mid-transfer and the relic is exactly where the database says (tested with hard kills of real servers).
• Full audit log: /hb history <relic> shows every claim, death, drop and deleted copy, with time and place.
• Tested with real Minecraft clients, including hard server kills, and with 16 threads racing for the same relic.

No hoarding, no hiding

• Restless relics: a relic whose ability goes unused for 3 hours of play time teleports away.
• Logging out? The relic stays with you, but your logout spot goes out at the next heartbeat. Stay offline 24 hours and it leaves you.
• Combat logging counts as a kill.
• No storage: relics can't go in chests, ender chests, shulkers or bundles.
• Claim protection: 15 seconds of immunity for a new Bearer, so relics don't ping-pong in a big fight.

Everyone knows who holds power

• Sidebar with all 12 relics: holder, hold time and bounty (toggle with /hb sidebar).
• Boss bar countdown for Bearers, turning red before the beat.
• Action bar for hunters: target relic, distance and time to the next heartbeat.
• Titles, sounds and lightning for every big moment, all editable.
• Optional resource pack with custom models for all 12 relics, the compass and the map. Without it, relics are vanilla items with names and glint.
• PlaceholderAPI: %heartbeat_holder_storm_crown%, %heartbeat_next_beat% and more.

Every system can be turned off

Not a fan of bounties? bounty.enabled: false. Want instant swaps instead of the map race? transfer.mode: direct (ally kills, repeat pairs and same-IP kills are still blocked). Every timer, distance, sound and message is in three commented files, and /hb reload applies the changes.

Built for real servers

• Paper and Folia from day one. Everything runs on the right region thread. On Folia, three extras are off because Folia has no scoreboards: the sidebar, the Mirror Shard's hidden name tag, and /team teammates counting as allies in direct mode.
• Light: 0.18 ms per tick with 200 simulated players, against a budget of 0.5 ms. Heartbeats are computed once per beat, not every tick.
• SQLite out of the box, MySQL optional.
• Plays nice with others: death handling only touches relic items, never your other custom items, at a priority you choose. A public API with cancellable events lets arena and duel plugins keep relics out of their deaths.
• Hooks: PlaceholderAPI, Vault, WorldGuard, LuckPerms; SimpleClans, Towny, Parties and mcMMO for allies.

Commands

Requirements

Paper or Folia 26.3 only, Java 25. Purpur works through Paper. Spigot is not supported: the plugin uses Paper-only features.

Support and disclosure

• Support: post in the discussion thread on the SpigotMC page. Bug reports with /hb history output get fixed fastest.
• Updates within a week of each new Minecraft release. Admins get an in-game notice when an update is out.
• The code is not obfuscated and has no DRM. Heartbeat was developed with AI assistance (Claude), including the item sprites. Every system is covered by automated tests and real-client dupe tests.
• Anonymous bStats metrics, which you can turn off with one line.