StrengthShards

Bounty-hunter progression for Paper 26.2 (Minecraft 26.2). Every player kill grants permanent +1 Strength (bonus attack damage); every death to another player takes one away. Veterans hit harder, victims hit softer — and the whole strength economy is player-driven through craftable, tradeable, edible Strength Shards.

• Requires a Paper 26.2 server (or newer 26.x) and Java 25
• No client mods required — the optional resource pack just improves the shard's texture
• Everything is configurable and survives restarts

The core loop

Strength is stored per-player UUID in plugins/StrengthShards/data.yml and persists across deaths, logins and server restarts. Being at ±0 strength is the neutral default.

The bounty-hunter twist

• You can't farm empty players. Killing someone who is already at minimum strength grants nothing — they have no strength left to give. The killer is told so, which doubles as intel: that target is worthless until they eat shards.
• Capped killers still get paid. A player already at max strength who kills someone can't absorb more strength, so the victim drops a Strength Shard instead — straight into the killer's inventory. If the killer's inventory is full, the shard drops on the ground at the death spot where anyone can steal it.
• Weakness is felt, not crippling. Negative strength reduces your total melee damage by a percentage, so drained players can still fight back — they just hit softer. (See below for why it isn't a flat reduction.)

How the damage works

The bonus is applied to the attack_damage attribute — the same mechanic Strength potions use — so it stacks with swords, axes and enchantments.

• Positive strength: flat +1 attack damage per point (+3 Strength = +3 damage on every melee hit).
• Negative strength: −15% total melee damage per point below zero (default; at −3 that's −45%, capped at −90% overall).

Why isn't negative strength flat? Since Minecraft 1.21.2, the attack_damage attribute is hard-clamped to a minimum of 0, and the game silently skips your entire attack (no damage, no knockback, no sound — even in creative mode) whenever the value isn't strictly above 0. A flat −3 on a bare fist (base 1.0) would make the player completely unable to hit anything. A percentage penalty keeps the value above zero, so weakened players always stay in the fight.

The plugin uses transient attribute modifiers that are re-applied on join/respawn and stripped on disable — no base values or item stats are ever touched, and nothing is left behind in your playerdata if you remove the plugin.

The Strength Shard

A custom item (blaze powder base) that grants +1 Strength when eaten — hold right-click like food, works even on a full hunger bar. Shards at the max cap refuse to be consumed (they aren't wasted) and are fully stackable, making them a natural currency: buy, sell, gift, gamble or hoard them.

Get shards by:

• Crafting — 4 blaze powder around 1 diamond (toggleable in the config):

  .  blaze powder  .
  blaze powder  diamond  blaze powder
  .  blaze powder  .
  

• Withdrawing your own strength — /strength withdraw 2 turns 2 of your strength into 2 shards

• Killing capped players or being capped yourself — see the bounty rules above

• Admin commands — /strength give, or vanilla /give (see below)

Shards carry an identifying data tag, so items created by the plugin, by admins, or via vanilla /give are all recognized and interchangeable.

Commands

Main command: /strength — aliases /str, /shards

Tab completion is provided for subcommands, player names and common amounts.

Permissions

Configuration

plugins/StrengthShards/config.yml — change anything and run /strength reload (or restart):

Resource pack (optional)

Without a resource pack, shards look like an enchanted blaze powder with a custom name — fully functional. Install the included resource pack and they render as a proper crystal shard.

1. Take the included strength-shards-resourcepack.zip and host it anywhere players can download it (your web server, a file host, a CDN)
2. Put the URL (and optionally its SHA-1 hash) into config.yml under resource-pack.url / resource-pack.sha1
3. Restart or /strength reload — players are prompted on join, and /strength pack re-sends the prompt

The pack uses the 1.21.4+ items/ model system (range_dispatch on custom_model_data), built for resource pack format 88 / Minecraft 26.2. If a future client warns the pack was made for an older version, it still applies once accepted — just bump pack.mcmeta if the warning bothers you.

Obtaining shards without the plugin economy (admins)

Server plugins cannot register custom item IDs and the vanilla creative menu is hardcoded client-side, so shards can't appear in either. Instead, run /strength givecmd in-game — it prints a ready-to-paste vanilla command built from your current config, e.g.:

give <player> minecraft:blaze_powder[minecraft:custom_name={text:"Strength Shard",color:"gold",italic:false},minecraft:lore=[{text:"Consume to permanently gain +1 Strength",color:"gray",italic:false},{text:"Hold right-click to eat. Tradeable!",color:"gray",italic:false}],minecraft:custom_data={PublicBukkitValues:{"strengthshards:strength_shard":1b}},minecraft:custom_model_data={floats:[2301f]},minecraft:food={nutrition:0,saturation:0.0f,can_always_eat:true},minecraft:consumable={consume_seconds:1.6f,animation:"eat",sound:"minecraft:entity.generic.eat",has_consume_particles:true},minecraft:enchantment_glint_override=true]

Items created this way are identical to crafted/withdrawn shards — the plugin recognizes and accepts them.

Installation

1. Drop StrengthShards-x.x.x.jar into your server's plugins/ folder
2. Restart the server (Paper 26.2, Java 25)
3. Optionally configure the resource pack URL (see above) and run /strength reload

Data is plain YAML in plugins/StrengthShards/data.yml — human-readable, editable, and trivial to back up. Removing the plugin cleanly reverts every player to vanilla stats.

FAQ

Does it work with Spigot? No — it targets Paper 26.2 (it uses Paper's data-component and Adventure APIs).

Can two players trade strength? Yes — one withdraws shards and hands them over; the other eats them. That's the whole point!

Can I change the crafting recipe ingredients? The recipe itself is fixed (4 blaze powder + 1 diamond) but can be disabled entirely (crafting.enabled: false); use /strength give or the vanilla give command to distribute shards another way.

What if a killer is at max and their victim is at min? The victim has nothing to give, so no strength moves — but the max-strength killer still receives the shard drop bounty.