Combat

Configured in pvp.yml. Command: /pvp.

The 1.7.10 feel

HCFCore plays the game's own combat. The 1.7 combat it once offered (no attack cooldown, sword blocking, 1.7 knockback) was removed on 29/09/2026: a plugin of its own, for 1.7.10 and 1.8, will follow 1.0.

Combat tag

A hit tags both players for 30 seconds (combat-tag.duration-seconds; tag-attacker decides whether the attacker is tagged too). /pvp (/ct) shows your tag; /deathban (/db), what dying would cost you.

A hit is anything the damage is credited to a player for:

• a blow or an arrow — projectiles trace back to the shooter, so an archer is tagged;
• the blast of TNT a player lit, or of a crystal a player struck.

A bed or respawn anchor set off in the wrong dimension is credited to nobody. Every rule on this page applies to credited blasts as to a blow.

While tagged, a player cannot use plugin teleports — /team hq, /team base, /team stuck, /spawn, /world, /top (block-teleport). A teleport countdown checks the tag at the start and again at the end.

The tag is not saved: it lasts a few dozen seconds, and making it survive a restart would punish players for the server being down.

Ender pearl cooldown

A pearl thrown means 15 seconds before the next (ender-pearl-cooldown in pvp.yml). A pearl thrown meanwhile is refused and stays in hand. The wait shows on the scoreboard, on the pearls in the hotbar, and as a Lunar Client icon; a death ends it, a logout does not. Until it is over, teleport commands are refused as in combat — /spawn, /team hq, /team stuck, /top, /world (block-teleport): a pearl out of a fight is not followed by a command out of it. A countdown already running is refused at its end. A partner item's Fake Pearl has its own cooldown and never starts this one (Abilities).

Item cooldowns

Some items wait between two uses (item-cooldowns in pvp.yml). As shipped:

Item	Wait	A death ends it
Enchanted golden apple (Gapple)	1 hour	no
Golden apple (Crapple)	10 seconds	yes
Chorus fruit	15 seconds	yes
Totem of Undying	2 minutes	no

Eaten meanwhile, the item is refused and stays; a totem on cooldown saves nobody. Each wait shows on the scoreboard, greyed out on the item in the hotbar, and as a Lunar Client icon. It is kept on the player: an hour's Gapple survives logouts and restarts. Add any item — each needs an id, a material, a wait and a name. Partner items are never counted: a Golden Head has its own cooldown. Staff end one with /cooldown reset <player> items, or a single item's id.

Combat logging

Logging out while tagged leaves a stand-in (logout: npc): a villager (logger.entity) appears where the player stood, named after them, at full health — 20, ten hearts (logger.health), whatever the player had. It never walks or trades, but a blow knocks it back as it would the player (logger.knockback), and only a player hurts it, by the same rules as a blow at the player it stands for: no hit in a safe zone, during SOTW, or on a teammate. Every hit starts both combat tags over — the stand-in's player's and the attacker's.

• Killed: the player's items fall where it stood, and the death counts like any other — deathban, DTR and team points lost, kill and money for the killer, a death sign. The player comes back to spawn with an empty inventory.
• Still standing when the tag runs out: it goes. The player lost nothing.
• The player back first: it goes and they take its place, still tagged, with the health they left with less the damage it took — never below half a heart.

A restart removes every stand-in: its player keeps their things. logout: kill is the old rule — death at once — and logout: none lets them go.

/logout is the way to leave that is visibly not an escape: a 30-second countdown that damage or moving cancels. It is refused while tagged, when it is typed and again when its countdown ends — striking a blow during the countdown tags the attacker, and the kick would then be a combat log.

Safe zones

Nobody hits or is hit on safe server land — spawn, typically (safe-zones.enabled). Server land created as a combat zone — roads, event grounds — and the warzone are fought on like anywhere else. See Territory.

A hit refused for any reason tags nobody.

Friendly fire

• Teammates never hurt each other (friendly-fire.teammates: false).
• Allies hurt each other only in an event area (friendly-fire.allies: EVENT_AREAS): inside the zone of a running KOTH, Citadel or Conquest, and on or by the King during Kill the King — where allied teams compete, since captures and the King are strictly per team. ALWAYS and NEVER are the alternatives.

Mountains are not event areas: nobody captures a node.

Not only hits

On a safe zone, a player takes no damage at all — not only no PvP: no fall, fire, drowning, suffocation, mob or cactus damage (pvp.yml, safe-zones.no-damage) — only the void and /kill still land, and their health and hunger are filled back up (heal, keep-fed).

A player in combat cannot enter one until their tag runs out (block-combat-tagged): a fight is not ended by running home to spawn. They see the border they may not cross as a wall of red glass within 15 blocks of them, all round — sent to them alone, never placed, like the claiming wand's columns (safe-zones.wall).

Where a player may not hit another — a safe zone, SOTW, a teammate, an ally outside an event area — they may not affect them either:

• a splash or lingering potion with a harmful effect does nothing to them (a potion of healing still heals);
• a fishing rod does not reel them in;
• a wind charge — or TNT or a crystal the player set off — does not push them.

Death signs

A kill by a player leaves a death sign: the dead player's name, "slain by", the killer's name and the date. It falls with the loot (or goes straight to the killer, death-signs.to-killer), and keeps its text when placed — by anybody, operator or not: the plugin writes it on the sign and waxes it, and no editor ever opens, so nobody rewrites it. A trophy wall of them is a classic of HCF bases. A won event leaves one too (Events).

Loot protection

For 10 seconds after a kill, what the dead player dropped can be picked up only by the killer and the killer's team — no other player, no mob, no hopper (loot-protection). Then it is ordinary loot.

• The drops fall where they always did; they only carry the claim.
• A death with no killer (lava, a fall) is not protected.
• The killer's allies are not included: strictly per team.
• team-shares: false keeps the loot for the killer alone.

Strength nerf

Strength potions give less than vanilla (strength-nerf): the plugin subtracts vanilla's bonus per level and adds its own, 1.5 by default. Only on a blow: an arrow's damage never had Strength in it.

Check vanilla-bonus-per-level for your version

Vanilla's bonus is a setting (3.0 shipped), not a constant: Mojang has changed the formula before, and the value for the targeted version could not be confirmed in official documentation. Verify it for your Minecraft version and correct it in pvp.yml — no recompile needed.

Knockback and attack speed

Both ship off: they change how combat feels, so they should be a deliberate choice.

• Knockback scales the knockback of one player hitting another — weapon, fist or projectile — with separate horizontal and vertical multipliers (1.0 is vanilla). Falling, sprinting and other plugins are untouched.
• Attack speed replaces every player's base attack-speed attribute (4.0 is vanilla's base); the weapon in hand still adds its own modifier. A higher value shortens the recharge between full-strength hits — a large one gives a pre-1.9 feel. It is given as a modifier never saved to player data: switching it off, or removing the plugin, leaves nobody with a changed attribute.

Switching combat off

enabled: false in pvp.yml disables the whole module: no deathbans, no combat tags, no combat tweaks. Each part also has its own switch. SOTW's no-PvP rule holds even then: it is the map's rule.