mobbanner

mobbanner

Earn enchanted-looking, mob-themed ward banners by killing mobs. Placing a ward suppresses that exact mob type's natural spawning throughout its 16x16 chunk, at every height. For Paper 26.3 / Java 25, with no runtime dependencies. On a complete valuable-block pyramid, the same banner attracts its mob instead.

Latest release: mobbanner 0.2.0 on Hangar.

What's new in 0.2.0

• Enderman banners: earn them at the same kill milestones or use /mobbanner give Alex enderman. There are now 38 supported mob types.
• Pyramid attraction: a complete 5x5 / 3x3 / 1x1 valuable-block base switches a standing banner from suppression to one extra spawn attempt per eligible spawn. Duplicate attractors do not stack; an ordinary matching ward overrides them.
• Compatible upgrade: existing banners and kill progress are preserved.

Rewards

Kills are tracked separately per player and per mob type. Banners are awarded at 100, 200, 300, 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, then 3000, 4000, and every further 1000 kills. Nothing is awarded at 400, 800, 2500, etc. Progress begins when this plugin is installed; historical Minecraft statistics are not imported.

A kill counts when Paper credits that player as the mob's killer, including projectile kills credited by the server. Environmental kills with no player credit do not count. Kills of spawner/raid/command-spawned mobs still count. Rewards go into the killer's inventory; leftovers drop at their feet if full. There is no operator or game-mode bypass. Kill counts are stored in player persistent data and saved with the server's normal player saves. Each milestone also sends the killer a message, for example: You earned a mob banner for killing 100 mobs of type Zombie!

Admin give command

Use /mobbanner give <player> <mob> to give one ward banner to an online player, for example /mobbanner give Alex bat or /mobbanner give Alex enderman or /mobbanner give Alex wither_skeleton. Tab completion lists players and supported mob types. Mob names are case-insensitive and multiword types use underscores. This is the plugin's give subcommand, not Minecraft's vanilla /give.

Requires mobbanner.give (operators by default); console is also supported. The recipient is notified that an administrator gave them a banner. This does not change their kill counts or claim they earned a milestone. If their inventory is full, the banner drops at their feet, just like earned rewards.

Supported mobs

Bat, Blaze, Bogged, Breeze, Cave Spider, Creaking, Creeper, Drowned, Elder Guardian, Ender Dragon, Enderman, Endermite, Evoker, Ghast, Guardian, Hoglin, Husk, Magma Cube, Parched, Phantom, Piglin Brute, Pillager, Ravager, Shulker, Silverfish, Skeleton, Slime, Spider, Stray, Vex, Vindicator, Warden, Witch, Wither, Wither Skeleton, Zoglin, Zombie, and Zombie Villager.

Spiders and cave spiders are included as normally hostile nighttime mobs. Endermen are included as an explicit exception to the hostile-only list. Other neutral/provoked mobs such as Piglin, Zombified Piglin, Bee, Wolf, and Polar Bear are excluded. Variants are separate types: a Zombie ward does not block Husks, Drowned, or Zombie Villagers.

Pyramid attraction mode

Place a standing ward banner centered on a solid, three-tier pyramid:

          banner
          1 x 1       directly below the banner
          3 x 3       middle layer
          5 x 5       bottom layer

All 35 blocks must be iron, gold, emerald, diamond, or netherite blocks; mixing those materials is allowed. Copper, ores, raw-metal blocks, and hollow pyramids do not qualify. Wall banners remain suppressors.

With a complete pyramid, the banner attracts instead of suppressing its mob: each successful eligible spawn triggers one extra nearby spawn attempt on the next tick, in that same chunk, at the same height, up to three blocks away. This is a 2x attempt rate, not a guaranteed 2x population or a change to the server's native spawn-rate setting. Duplicate attractors do not stack. A normal banner of the same type in that chunk takes precedence and suppresses spawning.

The extra attempt checks the world border, space for the original mob's full bounding box (including Enderman headroom), ground/water as appropriate, light no brighter than the original spawn, collisions with living entities, and at least 24 blocks from non-spectator players. It can fail; no retries occur. Extra entities use the CUSTOM spawn reason and cannot recursively trigger more attempts. Protection plugins can cancel that reason. These are plugin spawn attempts, not the full vanilla spawning algorithm: they do not rerun all biome, structure, mob-cap, or mob-specific placement rules. Original spawns still obey vanilla rules. Spawners, raids, eggs, and commands never trigger boosts.

Pyramid completeness is checked live, so adding/removing a block switches mode without re-placing the banner. Pyramid blocks can cross chunk boundaries but all participating chunks must be loaded; the plugin never force-loads them. An unloaded or incomplete pyramid behaves as an ordinary suppressing ward. Existing 0.1.0 banners work unchanged, even if their old lore only mentions suppression. Kill counts are preserved; Enderman counts start when 0.2.0 is installed.

Ward behavior

• Without a complete pyramid, blocks only NATURAL, CHUNK_GEN, REINFORCEMENTS, and PATROL spawn reasons. With a complete pyramid, those same reasons can trigger attraction instead.
• Does not block spawners, raids, eggs, commands, breeding, conversions, summoned mobs, boss construction/respawn, or other spawn reasons. Some mobs only spawn through those mechanisms, so their banners are chiefly trophies.
• Does not remove existing mobs or stop mobs entering from another chunk.
• Supports floor and wall banners, multiple wards, and different mob wards in the same chunk. Only that chunk is affected, not neighboring chunks.
• Uses persistent markers on items and banner blocks, surviving restarts and chunk unload/reload. Ordinary banners with the same patterns/names are not wards.
• Breaking and re-placing a ward preserves its identity. Removing the last ward for a type immediately stops protection. Support loss and flowing fluids drop the marked banner. Explosion drops preserve identity when the explosion's drop chance allows it. Pistons that would directly hit wards are blocked to avoid unmarked drops.
• Crafting with ward banners is disabled (including cloning them or putting them on shields). This prevents copying the reward via vanilla banner recipes.
• Renaming does not change the target mob; the identity is independent of lore.

Every applicable spawn checks only banner tile entities in the spawn's chunk; there is no global scan, ticking task, or persisted coordinate cache to become stale. Protection plugins' cancelled placement/spawn/drop events are respected. World-editing tools that erase block persistent data erase ward identity too.

Appearance

Vanilla skull/creeper face patterns, mob-themed colors, names, and enchantment glow require no resource pack. They are stylized faces, not exact mob textures; vanilla banners cannot display arbitrary mob artwork. The glow is cosmetic; no functional item enchantment is added.

Build and install

Download the compiled plugin from Hangar, or build it:

./gradlew build

Copy build/libs/mobbanner-0.2.0.jar into your Paper server's plugins/ directory and restart using Java 25. Gradle runs on Java 17+ and provisions Java 25 when needed; Windows users can use gradlew.bat. No configuration is required.

./gradlew test exercises milestones, persistent identities, rewards, and ward events. The available MockBukkit harness uses Paper 26.2 registry data; production compiles against 26.3. Smoke-test chunk boundaries, wall/floor banner drops, explosions, pyramid transitions, attraction safety checks, and your protection plugins on Paper 26.3 before production use. Remove the old plugin JAR when upgrading.

Upgrading from 0.1.0

1. Stop the server.
2. Remove the old mobbanner-0.1.0.jar from plugins/ and replace it with mobbanner-0.2.0.jar. Do not keep both versions installed.
3. Start the server. Existing ward banners and saved player kill counts remain usable; no data migration or banner replacement is required.
4. Build a complete pyramid under an existing standing banner to enable attraction, or leave it off a pyramid to retain suppression.

Hangar

Published project: rewrite123/mobbanner. Version 0.2.0 is available on the Release channel for Paper 26.3.

Publishing uses HangarMC's official plugin. For a future release, set a new, unique version in gradle.properties, set HANGAR_API_TOKEN to a key with create_version permission, and use:

./gradlew build publishPluginPublicationToHangar \
  -PhangarChangelog="Describe the changes in this release."

Defaults: Release channel, Paper 26.3. Set a unique version for each release in gradle.properties. Never commit API keys. Normal builds do not publish.

To update the Hangar project's main page from this README without publishing a new version, supply HANGAR_API_TOKEN with page-editing permission and run:

./gradlew syncAllPluginPublicationPagesToHangar