Frequently asked questions

The plugin does not start

packetevents is a hard dependency: without it the server never loads the plugin. ExyliaLib is listed as soft only so the loader can install it, but the plugin needs it to run. Check both are in plugins/.

"Targets need PacketEvents, which this server does not have."

A target is a pair of packet entities the server never has, so without a loaded PacketEvents there is nothing to draw and every drill and every duel request is refused with that line. The console says so at startup: "PacketEvents is missing: targets cannot be drawn and no drill can start".

"No arena is ready. Ask an administrator."

Drills and duels both need an arena, and there is no training where the player stands. An arena is ready when it is enabled, has its spawn set, and that spawn is in a world that is loaded. Open /aimtraineradmin, Arenas: a row marked incomplete is missing one of those.

The same line appears when every ready arena is full. arena.max-players-per-arena caps what one arena hosts, counting one per drill and two per duel; 0, the default, is unlimited. Every drill and duel goes to the ready arena hosting the fewest players at that moment, so a second arena shares the load.

Duels also cannot begin in the first moments after boot, before the arenas have been read from the database — the console prints Loaded N arenas and M drills once they have.

"Finish what you are doing first."

The player is already in a drill or a duel. "You are busy in <plugin>" means another Exylia plugin holds them — an FFA arena, an event, a practice match — and "Not right now: <reason>" means nobody holds them but a plugin advises against it, in its own words.

A player cannot duel somebody

"<name> is busy right now" means another plugin, or this one, holds that player. "<name> is <reason>" means nobody holds them but a plugin advises against it — this plugin's own reason is "answering a duel request", given while a request sits open on either side of them.

A player can only have one request waiting for them; a newer challenge replaces the older one. Requests expire after match.duel-request-expiry, thirty seconds by default, and both sides are told.

Hits feel off, or depend on ping

The client does the aiming. Every target carries a hitbox the client tests with its own raycast, at its own frame rate, and reports the one it hit — the same test a PvP hit uses — so a target is hit where the player sees it. A swing that reports no hitbox is checked against the server's own ray through the crosshair before it is called a miss.

Latency is accounted for where it would otherwise cost the player:

• Reaction times have the player's ping subtracted: the light took half a round trip to reach them and the click half a round trip to come back.
• Moving targets — strafing flicks, tracking and fights — are judged where the client drew them when the click or the aim left it: the server keeps every position it sent and rewinds by the ping plus the two ticks the client smooths a move over.
• Tracking reads the aim from the rotation packets as they arrive and forgives half a tick either side for jitter, not a wider target.

Why does spam clicking not help?

Every swing that hits nothing is a miss. In a flick drill a miss costs scoring.miss-penalty points (4) against the hit-points (10) a hit earns, and it drags the accuracy down.

In a fight, a hit on a target still red from the last one — ten ticks, as in the game — does nothing, in 1.8 and 1.9 drills alike, so spamming a 1.8 fight lands no more hits than clean clicks. In a 1.9 drill (attack-cooldown: true) every swing, hit or miss, and every change of held slot starts the cooldown over, and a hit on a swing charged no more than 90% is rushed and counts as a miss.

What is the difference between score and rating?

The score is the drill's own number: points per minute for flicks and fights, a reaction score for reaction drills, time on target for tracking. It decides duel rounds, where both sides play the same drill.

The rating is the score times the difficulty of the settings it was played at: the drill's weight, times what a smaller target is worth, times what a farther one is worth, clamped between scoring.min-difficulty (0.25) and max-difficulty (6.0). The rating is what the boards rank by default and what the overall board adds up, so nobody climbs by making their targets easy. See Scoring.

Can players walk during a drill?

No. Every player is frozen for the drill, since it measures their hands and not their legs. While in a drill or a duel they can only run the commands in training.allowed-commands — by default aim, aimtrainer, at, msg, r, tell and w. An ender pearl, a teleport from another plugin or a world change takes them out of the session.

A player stays in the arena after the drill ends

That is the rest: training.rest-seconds, five by default. The summary is on screen, Play again on the summary or the hotbar replays the drill with whatever settings the player has now, Change drill picks another, and the time running out sends an idle player home. A player who opened the settings or the drill list is still deciding, and the wait starts over. Set it to 0 to send players home the moment a drill ends.

How do I add a drill?

Write a new block under drills in config.yml and run /aimtraineradmin reload. A drill is a kind — FLICK, REACTION, TRACK or COMBO — and a set of numbers; nothing in the code knows the shipped ones by name, so a new one gets the same menus, records and boards. See Drills.

Records and boards are keyed by the drill's id. Renaming a key starts that drill over with empty boards, and a removed drill's history rows show its id where the name used to be.

Duels feel unfair when players use different settings

They do not use them, by default. With match.use-preferences: false both sides play the drill as written, and both share one seed, so the same targets appear in the same places in the same order on both screens. Turning it on applies the challenger's size and distance to both players.

What is a draw, and why was a duel cancelled?

A round goes to the higher score, then the better accuracy, then more hits. Level on all three is a draw: nobody scores, and the round is replayed under the same number. Three draws in a row means neither side is shooting, and the duel is cancelled with nothing stored.

Can I offer a best-of-2 or best-of-4?

List the length in match.formats and set match.allow-even-formats: true. An even series can end level once every round has been played; when it does, the winner of the last round takes the duel.

A player is not on the leaderboard

A board never places a zero, and there is one row per player. An accuracy only counts from sessions of at least leaderboard.accuracy-min-shots shots, twenty by default. Duels set no records at all: only drill sessions reach the boards and the overall rating.

The board is cached for leaderboard.cache-seconds, five minutes by default. Beating a best rating drops the cache at once, so a player who just set one sees themselves; a better accuracy or streak without a better rating waits for the cache to expire.

How do I reset a player's statistics?

/aimtraineradmin, Players, then the player and the reset button, behind a confirmation. The list shows online players only. The reset clears the profile — lifetime numbers, overall rating and duel record, while keeping their settings — every drill record, and their session history.

Can queued ExyliaPracticeCore players train?

Yes, with practice.train-while-queued on, the default. The player keeps their place in the queue, and the moment a match is found the drill ends and they go to it. practice.queue-prompt offers the drills in chat when somebody joins a queue, and practice.ranked-only limits that prompt to ranked queues. See Compatibility.

Players in a drill cannot see the server chat

That is chat.isolation, on by default: whoever is in a drill or a duel reads that one and nothing else, and the rest of the server reads none of it. Set it to false to leave chat as the server's chat plugin delivers it.

My changes to the hotbar menu disappear

menus/hotbar.yml is written from the jar on every start and every reload, over whatever is there. The other player menus follow the release while you have not touched them; an edited one is kept and the new version lands beside it as a .new file. menus/admin/ is rewritten on every start. See Menus.

My PlaceholderAPI placeholders show up unresolved

Every placeholder is the plugin name followed by its own name, %exyliaaimtrainer_wins%, through PlaceholderAPI and inside the plugin's own files alike. The older %exyliaaimtrainer_aim_wins% and %aim_wins% no longer resolve. See Placeholders.

Where are the arenas and the statistics?

In the database, not in YAML: aim_arenas, aim_profiles, aim_records, aim_sessions and aim_matches. H2 by default; point database.yml at MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or MongoDB to share them between servers. Session and duel history rows older than history.retention-days (30) are deleted every prune-interval-minutes (60); 0 days keeps everything. Reload does not touch any of it.

Does it work on Folia?

Yes, it declares Folia support, and every event it fires runs on the thread that owns the player or the arena it is about.

Where do I get support?

On the Exylia Discord.