SnKills changelog

Changes

• Internal cleanup: a boot-time config check that no longer applies to any supported layout was removed, together with the console messages it could print.
• Kept and clarified the one guard that does matter: a debug key holding a plain value is repaired before SnLib merges the shipped schema. SnLib's updater nests a section's children under whatever disk key it finds, so a hand-written debug: false would otherwise merge into invalid YAML, leave the plugin with an empty config, and silence every death message with nothing in the log to explain it.
• Comment and Javadoc cleanup across the pom, plugin.yml and the source.

Nothing changes for a running server: same config layout, same permission nodes, same messages.

SnKills prints a configurable death message per damage cause, and renders the killer's weapon in chat with its real in-game tooltip - name, enchantments, lore and attribute modifiers - by hovering the item itself rather than a rebuilt copy of it.

Built on SnLib, which provides the config, language, text, command and PlaceholderAPI layers.

How the message is chosen

First non-empty template wins:

1. death-messages.PLAYER_KILL - whenever the victim has a player killer, whatever the damage cause was.
2. death-messages.<DamageCause> - the cause that actually killed the victim.
3. death-messages.FALLBACK.

The vanilla death message is always suppressed, so all three empty means a genuinely silent death. Missing DamageCause entries are added to config.yml on startup, keeping the file in sync with the server's enum across Minecraft upgrades; an entry that matches no cause is reported by name in the console instead of being dropped in silence.

Placeholders

%victim%, %attacker%, %item% (the weapon, with its native hover), %prefix%, and any PlaceholderAPI placeholder - resolved with the victim as context. PlaceholderAPI is optional; without it the tokens are left untouched and the message still sends.

Requirements

• SnLib is required. Put SnLib.jar in plugins/ alongside SnKills. Updating SnLib always needs a restart, never a reload.
• Java 21+, Paper 1.20.4+.
• A valid Sn bundle licence key in plugins/.Sn-License/license.yml. On a first boot the file is created with a placeholder and the plugin disables itself until you fill it in. If you already run another Sn bundle plugin, the key is already there.

Other things you will notice

• /snkills help is SnLib's paginated, permission-filtered help.
• Command aliases: command.aliases in config.yml adds aliases live on /snkills reload. skills also ships in plugin.yml, so removing it from the config does not unregister it.
• The text pipeline understands MiniMessage colour tags (<gradient>, <rainbow>) on top of & codes and &#RRGGBB hex. Interactive tags (<click>, <hover>, <font>, <newline>) are deliberately left as literal text: a placeholder can resolve to text a player chose, and a death message goes to everyone on the server.
• Update notices reach holders of snkills.admin.update only.
• /snkills debug toggles verbose per-death diagnostics at runtime.

Permissions

SnKills has no player-facing commands, so the whole tree is admin-gated: snkills.admin is the parent of snkills.admin.reload, snkills.admin.debug and snkills.admin.update.

Verification status, stated plainly

This release passed a full audit: 8 criticals found, 6 fixed and blind-verified, 2 routed upstream to the shared licence template. An independent close pass across 8 dimensions found nothing new.

None of that is a runtime test. The plugin has not been booted on a production server as part of this release. If you hit something, open an issue - the console is verbose under /snkills debug.