MaceDamageCap

A lightweight Paper plugin that caps the maximum damage dealt by the vanilla Minecraft Mace. Built for Paper 1.21+ SMP servers where Mace smashes are unbalanced in PvP, raid farms, or any scenario where high fall-distance damage can one-shot players or destroy farms instantly.

Made with love by salatube <3

Features

• Caps the maximum Mace damage at a configurable value (default 14.0 = 7 hearts), regardless of fall distance, enchantments (Density, Breach, Smite, etc.), critical hits, Strength effects, or any other damage modifier.
• Preserves all vanilla Mace mechanics —> knockback, sounds, particles, and enchantment effects still work normally; only the damage value is reduced when it exceeds the cap.
• Per-player bypass system stored on disk using UUIDs, so it survives restarts and works for both online and offline players.
• Hot-reloadable configuration —> change the cap in-game and it is written straight to config.yml.
• Tab completion for every subcommand and argument.
• Colored, professional chat messages with a configurable prefix.
• Zero NMS / zero dependencies —> uses only the Paper API and net.kyori.adventure.
• Production-ready and SMP-safe —> single high-priority event listener, no per-tick work.

Installation

1. Download the latest MaceDamageCap-*.jar from the Releases tab.
2. Drop it into your server's plugins/ folder.
3. Start (or restart) the server.
4. Edit plugins/MaceDamageCap/config.yml to tune the cap, prefix, and limits.

Requires Paper 1.21+ and Java 21+.

Configuration

File: plugins/MaceDamageCap/config.yml

# MaceDamageCap - Main Configuration
# Made with love by salatube <3

# The maximum damage allowed for any vanilla Mace attack.
# 1 damage = 0.5 heart. Default 14 = 7 hearts.
damage-cap: 14.0

# Minimum allowed cap. Commands that would set a value below this are rejected.
min-cap: 0.0

# Maximum allowed cap. Commands that would set a value above this are rejected.
max-cap: 1000.0

# The chat prefix used by all plugin messages. Supports &-color codes.
messages-prefix: "&6&lMaceDamageCap &8&l\u00BB &r"

# Whether to log cap changes to the server console.
log-changes: true

All settings persist across restarts. Changes made via /mdc set are saved automatically.

Bypass data is stored separately in plugins/MaceDamageCap/bypass.yml as a list of player UUIDs.

Commands

Aliases: /mdc, /macecap

Player arguments accept either a player name (online or previously joined) or a raw UUID.

Permissions

You may also grant macedamagecap.bypass to a player manually through your permissions plugin (LuckPerms, etc.) and they will bypass the cap — no /mdc command required.

How it works

• The plugin listens to EntityDamageByEntityEvent at HIGH priority.
• If the damager is a player holding a Material.MACE in their main hand, the final computed damage (which already includes fall distance, enchantments, crits, and all other vanilla modifiers) is compared against damage-cap.
• If the value is higher, event.setDamage(cap) is called — the hit keeps all of its knockback, sound, and particle effects, but deals exactly the capped damage.
• Players whose UUID appears in bypass.yml, or who have the macedamagecap.bypass permission, are skipped entirely.

Example

• damage-cap: 14.0
• Normal Mace hit: 8.0 damage → remains 8.0
• Mace smash (35 damage): 35.0 damage → becomes 14.0
• Mace smash by bypass player: 35.0 damage → remains 35.0
• Mace smash by bypass player with Density V: remains uncapped

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/peroxide-dev/macedamagecap
cd MaceDamageCap
mvn clean package

The compiled jar will be in target/MaceDamageCap-<version>.jar.

Credits

Made with love by salatube <3