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Holograms

Holograms are floating displays you place in the world — a welcome sign at spawn, a live leaderboard by the arena, a rotating rules board, or a nameplate hovering over an NPC. uxmEssentials builds them from native Display entities (the same text/item/block display entities Minecraft ships), not from a packet trick, so they survive restarts, render for everyone the server chooses, and stay perfectly in sync without a client mod.

Everything about a hologram is edited live from /hologram (or the management GUI) and stored in the database — no config file to hand-write, no reload to see a change.

Hologram Types

A single hologram is a stack of lines, and each line can be one of five kinds:

Type Subcommand What it shows
Text addline <text> A MiniMessage line — colours, gradients, PAPI placeholders
Item item <material> A floating, slowly spinning item
Block block <blockdata> A small floating block (any block state)
Head head <source> A player head from a name, URL or texture
Entity entity <type> A miniature living entity display

Text lines are the workhorse. Because they resolve MiniMessage, you get the full modern formatting set (<gradient>, <rainbow>, <hover>, <click>) with no legacy & codes anywhere.

Mixing line types

A hologram can freely mix types — an item on top, a bold title, two body lines, and a block underneath. Line indices are 1-based, so /hologram setline 2 <text> edits the second line.

Lines & Pages

Lines are managed one at a time:

Subcommand Effect
addline <text> Append a line to the bottom
insertline <n> <text> Insert at position n
setline <n> <text> Rewrite line n
removeline <n> Delete line n

For content that changes on a schedule — a tip of the day, an event countdown — group lines into pages with page add | remove | list. The hologram cycles through its pages automatically on its refresh interval.

Display Look (Display-Meta)

Because holograms are real Display entities, you control every visual property the engine exposes. Each is its own subcommand:

Aspect Subcommand Notes
Billboard billboard <CENTER\|FIXED\|VERTICAL\|HORIZONTAL> Whether the display turns to face the viewer
Scale scale <factor> Grow or shrink the whole hologram
Alignment alignment <LEFT\|CENTER\|RIGHT> Text justification
Glow glow Outline glow (with a colour)
Opacity opacity Text transparency
Brightness brightness Block/sky light override, so it's readable at night
Background background The text panel's backing colour, or none
See-through seethrough Render through walls
Line width linewidth Wrap width for long text
Shadow shadow, shadowradius, shadowstrength Drop-shadow for the text
Translation / rotation translation, rotate <yaw> [pitch] Fine placement
View range viewrange, visibilitydistance How far away it renders

Move it, don't rebuild it

movehere teleports the hologram to you, moveto <x y z> to exact coordinates, and center snaps it to the centre of its block. copy clones an existing hologram with all its meta intact.

Live Content: Refresh & Placeholders

Text lines are re-rendered on a fixed cadence set by refreshinterval. On each refresh, any PlaceholderAPI tokens in the line (%uxmessentials_economy_balance%, %server_online%, and so on) are re-evaluated — so a hologram can show a live player count, TPS, or a scoreboard-style stat that ticks up as you watch.

The holograms.conf file adds a small symbols {} block for reusable glyphs and an opt-in damage-indicators { } feature (off by default) that pops short-lived damage numbers above entities.

Leaderboards

leaderboard <provider> [limit] turns a hologram into a live top-N board — top balances, most playtime, top voters — fed by a named provider and capped at limit rows. It refreshes on the same interval, so the standings stay current on their own.

Who Can See It: Visibility

Every hologram has a visibility mode that decides its default audience:

Mode Command Who sees it
ALL visibility ALL Everyone (the default)
PERMISSION visibility PERMISSION <perm> Only players holding <perm>
MANUAL visibility MANUAL Nobody, until you reveal it per-player

On top of the mode you can override individual players:

Subcommand Effect
show <player> Force-show to that player
hide <player> Force-hide from that player
blacklist <player> Permanently exclude a player
unblacklist <player> Remove them from the blacklist

This is how you build per-rank signage (a VIP-only board with PERMISSION) or a reward that a player only sees once you show it to them (MANUAL).

Click Action Chains

Holograms are interactive. Each one carries an ordered action chain that runs when a player clicks it, keyed by trigger:

  • left — runs on a left-click
  • right — runs on a right-click
  • any — runs on either

You build the chain step by step with the action subtree, and the steps run in order top to bottom:

/hologram action add right command:spawn
/hologram action add_after right message:<green>Teleporting you home…
/hologram action move_up right 2
/hologram action list right

action add | add_before | add_after | set | move_up | move_down | list | remove | clear give you full control over the sequence; clickcommand remains as a quick shortcut when you only need a single command. This is the same idea used by the NPC action chains — a click becomes a small, ordered script.

A hologram is a clickable button

Because the chain can run commands, send messages, and play sounds, a text hologram doubles as a menu-style button — "click to open the shop", "click to claim your daily", "click for the rules".

Linking to an NPC

A hologram makes an excellent multi-line nameplate above an NPC. Link the two with linknpc <npc> and the hologram tracks the NPC's position, giving you a rich name tag (rank line, title line, status line) that a plain NPC display name can't. unlinknpc detaches it again.

Commands

Holograms live under one root command, /hologram, gated by uxmessentials.hologram.use (the bare-root GUI branch also needs uxmessentials.holograms.gui). The full subcommand set covers creation (create, delete, list, copy), lines and pages, every display-meta property, visibility, leaderboards, and the action chain. See the Commands Overview for how the command surface works, and open the in-game panel with the bare /hologram if you'd rather point and click.

Like every module, holograms can be reloaded on their own with /uxmess reload holograms (tier node uxmessentials.module.holograms).

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