Server Messages

A Minecraft mod to customize any server message, with support for text formatting and placeholders.

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What does it do?

This mod lets you modify any^[1] server message to your liking. You can replace the message itself, add or change the formatting, and even use placeholders. The format is fully compatible with the translated text format used by language files.

Common use cases include changing the color of messages like "You have been banned", adding information to the "You're not whitelisted" message or customizing the kick notification. You could even use the mod to display some stats when a player joins or leaves the server or make death messages appear in rainbow colors. The possibilities are endless!

Note

For anything chat related, I recommend using Styled Chat instead. If you do, all related messages in this mod will be disabled to prevent conflicts. You can then change them using Styled Chat.

How do I use it?

To modify a message, you simply add the corresponding translation key to the config and change its value to your liking. The text format is based on the translated text format and also supports the QuickText Format for text formatting and global placeholders. You can reload the config with /reload.

The format for placeholders is ${placeholder} and for most messages you can only use placeholders that do NOT depend on a player/entity! So ${server:tps} and ${world:name} (overworld) are perfectly fine, but ${player:name} will not always work.
For more information, see Placeholder Contexts.

The config format is compatible with the Minecraft language file format. So you could simply replace the config with a language file (strongly discouraged) and it would work just fine. Note, however, that this would NOT overwrite the language setting of the players! For reference, you can find a list of all language files currently available here.

If you use translation keys manually (QuickText / STF or Text components), for example in chat messages or other mods, they will also be affected by this mod and thus use the same formatting as specified in the config. If you do not want this, you can either append r or raw to the QuickText / STF translation tags (<lang ...> -> <rlang ...>), or add #raw as the last argument to the translation arguments.
For example, <rawlang ...> is the same as <lang ... #raw> and will prevent the message from being modified. For Text components, it would look like this: {"translate": "...", "with": [..., "#raw"]}.

Note

Any other mod that modifies server messages (e.g. BanHammer), will most certainly take precedence over changes made by this mod.

Example Config

{
  // only change formatting
  "multiplayer.disconnect.not_whitelisted": "<red><bold><lang multiplayer.disconnect.not_whitelisted></bold></red>",
  // replace message; use placeholder
  "multiplayer.disconnect.server_shutdown": "<green>We'll be right back!</green>\n<gray><underline>Uptime: </>${server:uptime}</gray>",
  // add text; use nested translation argument
  "multiplayer.player.joined": "<yellow><lang multiplayer.player.joined '%s'>. Good to see you!</yellow>",
  // replace message; use translation argument
  "multiplayer.player.left": "<yellow>See you soon, <bold>%s</bold>!</yellow>",
  // custom translation key; add reason to kick message
  "multiplayer.disconnect.kicked.reason": "<lang multiplayer.disconnect.kicked>\n<yellow>%s</yellow>"
}

Warning

Don't copy this as is! The config is using the JSON format and JSON does NOT support comments. The comments in the example are just for clarification. Do not copy the comments!

Supported Translation Keys

In theory, every translation key is supported when it is used explicitly (e.g. in a translation tag). But natively, the server only uses a few translations. All translation keys, that are parsed on the server, are supported. That includes most of the messages you can see when playing on a server.

For a more detailed list of supported keys, see here.

Note

The information in this list may not be accurate!
Though it can be helpful to get a quick overview, it's only based on my findings and a lot of assumptions.

Placeholder Contexts

Contexts are additional information that allows different placeholders to work. For example, some mods like AfkPlus require the player context for their placeholders to work. This may not always be available in every message, so please check the additional contexts of your desired message in the list below.

All messages support the basic contexts, meaning the Server and the Overworld, but NOT the Player.

Translation Key(s)	Context	Version Added
chat.type.advancement.*	player	1.0
commands.ban.success	player	1.1
commands.banip.success	player	1.1
commands.deop.success	player	1.1
commands.kick.success	player	1.0
commands.op.success	player	1.1
commands.pardon.success	player	1.1
death.*	player	1.0
multiplayer.disconnect.*	player if the player was already on the server before the disconnect, otherwise profile. Exceptions (non-exhaustive list) .transfers_disabled, .outdated_client, .incompatible These only have the default context (server).	1.1 (some 1.0)
multiplayer.player.joined	player	1.0
multiplayer.player.joined.renamed	player	1.0
multiplayer.player.left	player	1.0

If you want a specific context added, please open an issue or tell me on Discord.

Additional Translation Keys

This mod also adds some additional translation keys for use in the config. They will let you customize some messages that you normally would not be able to change.

Note

These translation keys are not provided by Minecraft itself and only work when specified in the mod config.

Translation Key	Context	Notes	Default	Version Added
multiplayer.disconnect.kicked.reason	player	Sent to the kicked player(s), if there was a reason specified. The reason is the only argument (%s). See multiplayer.disconnect.banned.reason.	%s	1.1

Why do I need it?

Almost every text message, a vanilla server sends to its players, uses a translation key to display the corresponding message. So instead of sending actual text (e.g. <Player> joined the game), it sends something like translate[multiplayer.player.joined]. The client then converts this into actual text, using the player's selected language. This way the game ensures that each player will see the message in their preferred language. While this is pretty helpful, sometimes it may not be the behavior you want, because you cannot change the formatting of those messages without forcing your players to use a custom resource pack. This is why this mod exists.

Usually those messages are displayed as plain old white text, which is pretty boring. So to spice things up, you need to be able to change those messages server wide. For example, you can change the "not on whitelist" message to give your new players some more information. You could also change the color of the "you have been banned" message to make it stand out. There are a lot of those server messages that you may want to customize, so give it a try!

How does it work?

This mod replaces the translation key with the text you specified in the config, before the text is sent to the player. This way the player receives your custom message instead of the default one. This does not necessarily affect the translation of the messages. So you can add formatting to messages without losing the auto translation feature (see example config).

To prevent infinite recursion, all translation keys used in your custom messages will have their default values and formatting, not the values you provided.

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[ 1 ]: There are some special cases where it might not work as expected due to how Minecraft handles certain messages. If you encounter one of those, please open an issue, and I'll see what can be done to make them work too.
Player chat messages (also /me, etc.), unfortunately are not supported by this mod. Use Styled Chat for these instead.