Rules & Community

⚖ THE SURVIVOR’S CODE
How we protect players, builds, fair play, and the strange little world we share.

Rules at a Glance

☣ THE ONE RULE
Do not make PlagueMC worse for the people sharing it with you.

You are responsible for knowing these rules. “I did not read them” explains a mistake; it does not undo one.

⚡ The short version

  1. Respect people. No harassment, hate speech, threats, doxxing, sexual misconduct, or targeted abuse.
  2. Respect property. No griefing, theft, unwanted modification, claim abuse, or destructive trespassing.
  3. Play fairly. No hacked clients, x-ray, automation that plays for you, duping, exploits, or unfair information tools.
  4. Keep chat usable. No spam, disruptive formatting, impersonation, scams, unsolicited advertising, or explicit content.
  5. PvP requires consent. Do not attack, kill, trap, or repeatedly target players who have not agreed to fight.\n6. Do not evade moderation. Alternate accounts, VPNs, or technical workarounds must not be used to bypass a restriction.
  6. Use common sense. A loophole in the wording is not permission to harm the server or its community.

Long-standing PlagueMC rules also prohibit lava casting, abusing alternate accounts for rewards or mob spawns, monopolising public farms, and creating harmful lag. The detailed pages explain each of these.

Not sure? Ask staff before doing the questionable thing. Permission is much easier to obtain before the crater exists.

🧭 Scope

These rules apply to:

Staff may act on behavior that clearly violates the purpose of a rule even when the exact method is not listed. Rules are interpreted in context, not as a loophole-finding minigame.

Community & Chat

💬 CHAT IS A SHARED SPACE
Personality is welcome. Making everyone else leave the room is not.

🤝 Treat people like people

Disagreement, teasing between friends, and ordinary frustration happen. The line is crossed when conduct becomes targeted, repeated, discriminatory, threatening, sexual, or deliberately humiliating.

Not permitted:

If somebody clearly asks you to stop contacting them, stop.

📢 Keep communication readable

Avoid:

Swearing alone is not an excuse to target somebody. Context and intent matter more than pretending one word exists in a vacuum.

🛡 All-ages community

PlagueMC’s shared spaces must remain suitable for users of all ages. Do not post, describe, request, link, or distribute NSFW, pornographic, sexually explicit, or otherwise adult-oriented content anywhere in the Minecraft or Discord community.

Keep highly political or sensitive debates out of community channels when they are likely to create hostility or derail the space. This is a survival community, not a venue for recruiting people into an argument.

📡 Discord conduct

Use channels for their stated purpose and follow pinned or channel-specific guidance. Do not derail conversations, flood reactions or emojis, or repeatedly self-promote.

Do not:

Ask staff before adding any bot or automated integration. All Discord activity must also comply with Discord’s own terms and policies.

🏷 Names, skins, builds, and media

Usernames, nicknames, skins, capes, signs, books, images, map art, builds, and linked media must follow the same community standards as chat. Staff may require content to be changed or removed.

Remember: “It was a joke” describes intent. It does not erase the effect or make prohibited content acceptable.

Building, Claims & Property

🏚 LEAVE OTHER PEOPLE’S WORK ALONE
If you did not build it, place it, earn it, or receive permission for it, do not treat it as yours.

⛏ No griefing

Griefing includes deliberately damaging, defacing, burying, flooding, burning, exploding, obstructing, or otherwise spoiling another player’s work or a shared area.

It also includes indirect damage such as:

Unclaimed does not mean abandoned. Unlocked does not mean free.

📦 No theft

Do not take items, animals, crops, resources, shop stock, or drops belonging to another player without permission. Do not exploit unlocked containers, broken protections, hopper mechanics, shop mistakes, or access granted for another purpose.

Return accidental pickups when reasonably identifiable.

🗺 Give builds room

Do not crowd, surround, claim over, or deliberately interfere with an established project. Ask before connecting roads, walls, farms, redstone, portals, or utilities to another player’s area.

When settling near somebody:

  1. Look for signs of active use.
  2. Check the live map.
  3. Ask when the boundary is unclear.
  4. Leave enough room for both projects to grow.

🌲 Protect the landscape

Build with the shared world in mind. Avoid excessive deforestation, pointless terrain destruction, floating treetops, abandoned scaffolding, and large excavation scars in visible or communal areas.

Replant trees, repair accidental environmental damage, and restore temporary work sites when practical. Resource gathering is part of survival; leaving needless destruction behind is not.

🔐 Protection is not permission

Container and door protection helps prevent interference; it does not define ownership by itself. Do not use protections or claims to seize shared infrastructure, block access, hold an area hostage, or trap another player’s belongings.

Found an old build? Ask staff before claiming, dismantling, or looting it. They can check history more reliably than a suspiciously empty chest can.

Fair Play & Client Mods

⚔ SURVIVAL, NOT SOFTWARE ADVANTAGE
If a tool finds, fights, moves, mines, duplicates, or decides for you, assume it is not allowed.

🚫 Prohibited advantages

Do not use:

Attempting, testing, distributing, or teaching an exploit can be treated the same as using it.

✅ Usually acceptable

Ordinary performance, accessibility, and cosmetic tools are generally fine when they do not reveal hidden information or automate play. Examples include:

This is guidance, not an exhaustive allow-list. A permitted mod can still be misused.

🐛 Bugs and exploits

If you discover a bug:

  1. Stop reproducing it once you understand what happened.
  2. Do not share it publicly or profit from it.
  3. Record the time, location, and steps if safe to do so.
  4. Report it privately to staff on Discord.

Good-faith reporting matters. Finding a bug is not misconduct. Concealing, spreading, or exploiting it is.

PvP, Trading & Player Conduct

🗡 PvP

Do not attack, kill, trap, or pursue another player without their consent. Consent must be clear, current, and specific to the fight or event; simply entering the wilderness, carrying valuables, enabling a setting, or accepting a teleport is not consent. A player may withdraw from an informal fight unless an agreed event rule says otherwise.

Not permitted:

Items legitimately lost during ordinary combat are not automatically restored. Staff judge disputes by context and evidence.

💰 Trades and shops

Honor the terms you clearly agree to. Verify player names, item details, quantities, and payment amounts before completing a trade.

Scams, intentionally misleading listings, payment fraud, shop exploits, and abuse of obvious pricing mistakes are prohibited. Normal price negotiation and market competition are not scams.

Real-money trading involving in-game items, currency, accounts, services, or server benefits is not allowed unless explicitly offered through an official PlagueMC channel.

🌾 Farms, entities, and server health

Build responsibly. Staff may limit or remove machines, farms, entity collections, chunk loaders, or redstone systems that create unreasonable lag or threaten stability.

Do not intentionally:

Keep passive mobs to 50 or fewer per chunk. Flowing-water grinders, automatic farms, AFK farms, and other automation may be limited or removed when they are unfair, monopolise resources, or harm performance.

Public farms are shared infrastructure. Use them fairly, replant or reset them where appropriate, and do not AFK at a public farm or warp when doing so prevents others from using it.

Large project? Ask staff early. It is much nicer to tune a design than to dismantle a lag monument.

Enforcement, Reports & Appeals

🛡 MODERATION HAS TWO GOALS
Protect the community now, and make better behavior possible afterward when it is safe to do so.

📏 How rules are enforced

Staff consider severity, intent, impact, evidence, cooperation, history, and risk to the server. Outcomes may include:

Not every case begins with a warning. Severe cheating, threats, doxxing, destructive griefing, attacks on server stability, or ban evasion may justify immediate removal.

Staff may act to contain an incident while it is investigated. A temporary restriction is not always the final decision.

?‍⚖️ Working with staff

Follow reasonable staff instructions related to safety, moderation, server stability, or an active incident. You are not required to agree with every decision, but you must remain patient enough for staff to do their job. Do not impersonate staff, deliberately waste their time, interfere with an active case, or backseat-moderate other players.

If a staff member mistreats you, preserve the relevant context and make a private complaint. Public escalation and retaliation make a fair review harder, not easier.

🚨 Reporting a problem

Report urgent issues in game when staff are present. Use Discord for private, detailed, or offline reports.

Include:

  1. Your exact username and the usernames involved.
  2. What happened, without exaggeration.
  3. Approximate time, world, and coordinates.
  4. Screenshots, video, chat context, or transaction details.
  5. What you have already done in response.

Do not retaliate, publicly campaign for punishment, edit evidence deceptively, or repeatedly message multiple staff members for a faster answer.

📨 Appeals

An appeal should explain:

An appeal is not improved by insults, threats, fabricated evidence, or having friends pressure staff. Time served alone does not guarantee access will be restored.

👥 Alternate accounts and evasion

Do not use another account, address, VPN, proxy, or player to bypass a mute, ban, cooldown, restriction, or investigation. Accounts reasonably connected to evasion may also be restricted.

If multiple legitimate players share a connection, tell staff when it becomes relevant rather than using that fact to conceal evasion.

The best moderation outcome is boring: the harm stops, the facts are clear, and everyone can move on.