Overview

zChat is a lightweight, high-performance chat plugin for Paper (and Folia) networks. It handles the chat essentials almost every server wants — group-based message formatting, a word/pattern filter, a per-player cooldown, a global chat mute, chat clearing, and a per-player chat toggle — each individually toggleable, permissioned, and with fully customizable MiniMessage text.

Because it runs on every chat message, that path is built to be cheap: group formats are pre-parsed, filter patterns are pre-compiled, all runtime state is lock-free, and the message renderer runs once per message (not once per viewer). No always-on tick work, a tiny memory footprint, and clean, fail-safe startup/reload.

Built to stay up

zChat is built to stay up: every code path fails safe. It never throws out of enable/reload, never blocks the main thread, and never disables itself on a bad config value. A malformed format template falls back to a plain rendering rather than dropping a message. It's Folia-ready — the same jar runs on Paper, Purpur and Folia, with all runtime state thread-safe and every player mutation on the correct scheduler.

Requirements

• Paper (or a fork like Purpur, or Folia) 1.20.6 or newer — the first release where the modern Brigadier command API and the AsyncChatEvent / ChatRenderer API are stable. A jar built against 1.20.6 runs unchanged on all newer versions, with no runtime performance cost.
• Java 21 runtime.
• No hard dependencies — groups resolve by permission node, so any permissions plugin (LuckPerms, etc.) works, but none is required.

Next steps

• Formatting — group-based chat formats, weights, and placeholders.
• Configuration — install, filter, cooldown, commands, permissions, and reload semantics.

Links

• Source — github.com/xena-studios/zchat
• Downloads — Modrinth · Releases
• License — GPL-3.0