Unplugged AFK: Paper Edition

Stay AFK without leaving your computer on. /unplug disconnects you and leaves a bot standing exactly where you were — same skin, same gamemode, in the tab list — so your farms keep running while your machine is off. Log back in and you take its place.

A Paper plugin port of sakura-ryoko's Unplugged-AFK Fabric mod.

Requirements

• Paper 26.2 (or a fork of it). Not Spigot or Bukkit — this uses Paper-only internals.
• Java 25, which Paper 26.2 requires anyway.

Drop the jar in plugins/ and restart. There are no other dependencies.

This plugin removes players from the player list and rewrites their .dat files — that is how it works, not a side effect. Try it on a test server or take a backup first.

How it works

/unplug kicks you, then places a real server-side player in your position on the next tick. It is a genuine ServerPlayer, so it keeps chunks loaded, ticks farms, shows up in the tab list, and can be hurt or killed.

Sessions survive a restart: bots are written to the config on shutdown and respawned on boot, staggered a few seconds apart, with the downtime subtracted from their remaining time.

Commands

Players

Administration

/unplugged-admin — operator by default.

The subcommands info, list players|unplugged|all and set require advancedAdminOptions to be enabled in the config.

Permissions

Where no node is set, the plugin falls back to the operator level configured in commands, matching how the Fabric mod behaved.

Limiting session length

The highest node a player holds wins, so someone in several groups gets the most generous one. With no node granted, the ceiling is defaultUnpluggedTimeout.

The ceiling applies to the default as well as to an explicit argument, so a player with maxtime.60 gets 60 minutes from a bare /unplug. Asking for more clamps and says so.

# LuckPerms: let regulars idle for a day, donors indefinitely
/lp group default permission set unplugged_afk.maxtime.1440 true
/lp group donor permission set unplugged_afk.maxtime.unlimited true

Configuration

See CONFIG.md. The file lives at plugins/unplugged-afk-paper-edition/unplugged-afk-paper-edition.json, and a config from the Fabric mod or an earlier build is adopted automatically.

For developers

UnpluggedAfkAPI exposes session state, and three Bukkit events fire as sessions begin, respawn and end.

if (UnpluggedAfkAPI.isUnplugged(player.getUniqueId()))
{
    // that "player" is a bot
}

@EventHandler
public void onUnplugged(UnpluggedStartEvent event)
{
    getLogger().info(event.getPlayerId() + " went AFK");
}

Differences from the Fabric mod

Behaviour is otherwise the same. Known differences:

• Bots appear a few ticks later. Paper defers disconnects by a tick, so the bot is placed after the player is fully gone rather than instantly.
• Slime-block flying machines are approximate. The push is applied from the bot's own tick instead of from inside the piston's movement code, so fast machines may behave differently.
• Escaping the End is a plain teleport. The original substituted the player during respawn, which Paper does not allow.
• resetHealthUponDeath actually keeps the session alive. In the Fabric mod it healed the bot and ended the session anyway.
• Single version. This targets Paper 26.2 only, where the mod supported 1.19.2 through 26.2.

Other plugins see bots as ordinary players joining and quitting, from 127.0.0.1. Anticheats in particular may object to a player that moves without a client; if you hit that, exempt the bots or turn on unpluggedHidePlayer.

Building

./gradlew build

The jar is written to build/libs/.

Licence

LGPL-3.0, inherited from the original mod. Copyright remains with sakura-ryoko and contributors; see the file headers.