Minecraft EssentialsX Chat Plugin

in Plugins

By Nathan Young

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Overview

The default chat format from Minecraft is simple with no colors, which can make it less appealing to your players. You might even want to change the symbols for containing the player’s username to match your design. Luckily, EssentialsX Chat allows you to completely format the in-game chat for users in a Spigot or Paper server. The plugin can hook into your permissions manager to allow for ranks to be displayed too, which is useful for larger servers. For instance, you can make an owner format so other people know you own the server. However, that functionality requires other plugins to establish compatibility between the chat and prefixes to properly display in-game. Apex Hosting will walk you through the instructions for installing the plugins and configuring your server’s chat format.
 

Installation

1. Head to the EssentialsX Download page and press Download on EssentialsX & EssentialsX Chat.
   
2. Afterward, navigate towards Vault’s Spigot page and click Download Now.
   

   Note: Vault is required to support chat formatting among other features.

3. Once all JAR files are downloaded, head towards your Apex server panel and in the top left corner click FTP File Access.
4. Login with your panel password and enter into the plugins directory.
5. On the left hand side, press Upload and drag the files into the respective area.
   
6. Wait for the files to reach 100% and head towards the main panel to Restart the server. That’ll begin loading the plugins!

Getting Started

The main plugin that controls formatting chat is EssentialsX, which has been active since 2015 and gained over 6 million downloads. This plugin is compatible with Minecraft versions 1.8 to 1.19 and is constantly being updated to support newer instances of the game. The EssentialsX Chat addon is one of the most popular chat plugins on the market and is heavily suggested if you already have the main plugin installed.
 

Chat Format

The Chat addon for EssentialsX has default placeholders that you can use to format the chat. Unfortunately, there are no commands in-game to edit the format, so accessing the configuration through the FTP panel is required. In order to access the settings, follow the steps below.

1. Head to the FTP File Access area and login with your panel password.
2. Once there, enter into the plugins directory and click on the EssentialsX folder.
3. Locate the config.yml file and press Edit to the far right of it.
4. Scroll down until you see the Chat section, which should be near line 870.
   
5. Afterward, you can now start editing the format values accordingly.

 
You’ll notice that the settings are placeholder values used to grab onto the sender’s username and message. The less than & greater than symbols aren’t associated with the placeholder, but are the actual design of how chat would appear in-game. By default, EssentialsX focuses on the innate game’s chat format. You can use Minecraft Color Codes if you want to show more color in-chat. For example, using '&9{DISPLAYNAME}&7: {MESSAGE}' for the values would make the username Blue and the message Gray with a colon separating them.

 
There are other placeholders you can use for EssentialsX Chat, which you may view down below.

{MESSAGE}  -  The content of the chat message.
{USERNAME}  -  The sender's username without any nicknames or rank prefix.
{DISPLAYNAME}  -  The sender's display name with nicks and prefixes.
{NICKNAME}  -  The sender's nickname. If the sender has no nickname, the username is shown.
{WORLD}  -  The world alias of the sender's current world. 
{WORLDNAME}  -  The full name of the sender's current world.
{SHORTWORLDNAME} - The first character of the sender's current world.
{TEAMNAME}  -  The sender's scoreboard team name.
{TEAMPREFIX}  -  The sender's scoreboard team prefix.
{TEAMSUFFIX}  -  The sender's scoreboard team suffix.

All you’ll want to do is copy and paste the value you want into the chat format fields to start editing it. Just make sure to include any other symbols you want, such as brackets or colons. For example, you can use '&8[&3{WORLD}&8]&9 {DISPLAYNAME}&7: {MESSAGE}' for a custom world-specific chat format with colors.

 
You can find more information about formatting your Minecraft chat on EssentialsX's Chat Wiki.
 

Rank Prefixes

Most Minecraft servers have ranks or groups that show the different types of players. For example, you may see Owner, Admin, Moderator, VIP, Donor, or anything else in other servers. Those groups are mainly shown in the chat, which is configurable with EssentialsX Chat. However, it requires a permission management plugin such as LuckPerms to create the groups. Once your server has ranks, then you can start adding them into your chat’s format. Although, it should be noted that Vault is required for this setup. Check out the placeholder values down below to get an idea of what you can use for the format.

{PREFIX}  -  The sender's rank prefix.
{SUFFIX}  -  The sender's rank suffix.
{GROUP}  -  The sender's primary group name.

Inside the main config.yml file, you can edit the format per rank/group. You can view our example configuration down below.

 
Keep in mind that the group prefix would be shown in the {DISPLAYNAME} value. If you want to use that placeholder, then make sure the format is with your group prefix in your permissions plugin. For instance, a rank called “Apex” may have a prefix in LuckPerms as “[Apex] “. The brackets, group name, and the added space afterward all formats into your chat.

 
If you don’t want to format the group’s prefix from the plugin, then the following setting is suggested: '&7[{PREFIX}&7]&r {NICKNAME}:&7 {MESSAGE}'. That’d make the prefix have its standalone value with the player’s nickname as the username. Otherwise, you may use the {USERNAME} setting instead to achieve the same format in-game.
 

Conclusion

Having formatted chat for your Minecraft server helps make it appear professional due to the categorization of ranks, worlds, and players. There are endless possibilities for your format because of the placeholders and colors you may use, so get creative! Although, remember to install the required plugins to ensure all compatibility to make the chat perfect in-game. We hoped this resource helped you learn how to format chat on your server.
 

Useful Links

EssentialsX’s Chat Wiki
Minecraft Color Codes
EssentialsX Download page
Vault’s Spigot page