Lifesteal

Table of contents

  1. How it works
  2. Enabling lifesteal
  3. Zero-heart policy
  4. Per-world overrides
  5. Mob deaths
  6. Combat-logout protection
  7. Health scaling
  8. Config references

The lifesteal mechanic awards the killer hearts and deducts them from the victim on every player-versus-player death. All behavior described here is driven by lifesteal-core.yml and lifesteal-worlds.yml.

How it works

  1. Player A kills Player B in PvP.
  2. Player A receives hearts-per-kill additional hearts (clamped by max-hearts).
  3. Player B loses hearts-lost-on-death hearts.
  4. If Player B’s hearts reach zero, they are either banned or kicked depending on ban-when-zero-hearts.

Heart amounts support decimals for fine-grained balancing (e.g. 0.5 hearts per kill in a soft season).

Enabling lifesteal

Set the master switch in lifesteal-core.yml:

global-enabled: true
default-hearts: 10
max-hearts: 20
min-hearts: 0
hearts-per-kill: 1.0
hearts-lost-on-death: 1.0

default-hearts is the starting value for new players and the reset target for /lifesteal reset <player>.

Zero-heart policy

When a player’s hearts hit zero they can be banned (standard lifesteal) or merely kicked:

ban-when-zero-hearts: true
zero-heart-ban-message: "You have run out of hearts."
# Console commands run before the ban/kick — %player%, %killer%, %hearts% supported
zero-heart-commands:
  - "broadcast &c%player% has been eliminated by %killer%!"

Set ban-when-zero-hearts: false to kick without a game ban (softer season style).

Per-world overrides

Restrict lifesteal to specific worlds or apply different rates per world using lifesteal-worlds.yml:

# Lifesteal only runs in these worlds
enabled-worlds:
  - world
  - world_nether

# Override rates for a specific world
world-overrides:
  world_nether:
    hearts-per-kill: 2.0
    hearts-lost-on-death: 2.0

Leave both enabled-worlds and disabled-worlds empty to run lifesteal in every world with the global rates.

Mob deaths

By default, dying to a mob does not cost hearts — only PvP deaths do. You can change this and optionally protect low-health players:

# lifesteal-mobs.yml
dont-remove-hearts-from-mobs: true   # set false to enable mob heart loss
mob-remove-hearts-greater-than: -1   # protect players at or below this value; -1 = off

Mob kill rewards (hearts given for killing specific mob types) are configured in the same file. See the Mob Rewards config reference for details.

Combat-logout protection

Prevent players from logging out to dodge heart loss:

combat-logout-protection:
  enabled: true
  tag-duration-seconds: 15.0

A player who disconnects while combat-tagged will still lose hearts as if they died.

Health scaling

If you want the on-screen heart row to always display at a fixed size regardless of actual max health, enable health scaling:

apply-health-scale: true
health-scale: 20.0

Config references