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Offline Mode (Cracked)

uxmEssentials runs fully on offline-mode servers (online-mode=false in server.properties, often called cracked). Every module works the same; nothing is gated behind a premium account check. This page explains the one place where an offline-mode server behaves differently from an online-mode one, and what the plugin does about it.

How Accounts Are Identified

Every piece of player data in uxmEssentials (homes, balance, vaults, punishments, kits) is keyed by UUID, never by name. That is what makes a rename harmless and a lookup exact.

Where the UUID comes from depends on the server mode:

Mode Where the UUID comes from
Online Mojang, one stable UUID per account, whatever the name is today
Offline Derived from the name itself, by the server, character for character
Behind a proxy Whatever Velocity or BungeeCord forwards, so the backends agree

On an offline-mode server the derivation is case-sensitive: Steve and steve are two different UUIDs, so they are two different accounts. That is vanilla server behaviour, not something a plugin chooses.

Resolving a Name to an Account

This is the part that used to bite. When a command takes a player name, the server can normally translate it through its own name cache, so /ban steve finds Steve. But the server only consults that cache in online mode. In offline mode it skips the cache and derives a UUID from exactly what was typed, so /ban steve would have pointed at an account nobody owns, and the command would have answered "unknown player" or, worse, punished a ghost.

uxmEssentials therefore keeps its own name index: the name each account last joined under, stored in the database and held in memory. A name is resolved in this order:

  1. A player who is online right now (case-insensitive).
  2. The plugin's name index (case-insensitive).
  3. The server's own lookup, as a last resort.

The result: /ban griefer, /eco give Griefer 100 and /home visit GRIEFER all reach the same account, on online-mode and offline-mode servers alike, and commands that work on absent players keep working when the player is offline.

Filling the Index

  • On join. Every login records the account and the exact name it joined under.
  • At first start. The first time this version starts, the plugin seeds the index from the server's existing player files, so names from before the upgrade are known without waiting for those players to come back.
  • Size. lookup.name-index-size in config.conf caps how many names are held in memory (default 50000, roughly 6 MB). Names beyond that window still resolve when the case matches exactly. See config.conf (Globals).

Nothing about this is offline-mode-only: online-mode servers use the same index and get the same case-insensitive resolution without a Mojang round-trip.

A Player Who Has Never Joined

A name the plugin has never seen has no account to point at. Commands that must act on someone anyway (a vote arriving for a player who has not yet connected, for example) fall back to the UUID the server would derive, so the reward or record is waiting for them when they arrive. Commands that need an existing account (punishments, payments) report that the player is unknown rather than inventing one.

Skins

A cracked account has no Mojang skin of its own, but a name still has one wherever that name exists as a real account, and that is what a player:<name> tablist entry or an /npc skin name:<name> asks for.

uxmEssentials fetches those textures from Mojang directly. The platform's own profile completion is not used, because it consults the session service only in online mode and returns a profile with no textures at all on a cracked server. The lookup is shared and cached server-wide, and skins { mojang-lookup } in config.conf turns it off entirely for a server with no outbound network.

A player's own skin on a cracked server is a different matter: it comes from whatever skin plugin you run, and uxmEssentials reads the live profile first, so whatever that plugin put there is what renders.

Networks

If your backends sit behind Velocity or BungeeCord, put the proxy in charge of identity and switch the backends to online-mode=false with forwarding configured. The UUIDs are then the proxy's, identical on every backend, and uxmEssentials's cross-server sync (homes, economy, vaults, punishments) lines up as expected. See Velocity & Redis.

Next Steps