paperweight-userdev

paperweight is the name of Paper’s custom build tooling. The paperweight-userdev Gradle plugin part of that provides access to internal code (also known as NMS) during development.

Why this is useful

This is the only supported way of accessing server internals, as redistributing the server JAR is against the Minecraft EULA and general license assumption. Even if you manually depended on the patched server, you would be hindering other people working on your project and would be missing deployed API javadocs/sources in your IDE.

On top of that, Spigot and pre-1.20.5 Paper versions still use Spigot mappings, which are a mix of obfuscated fields/methods and mapped as well as custom named classes. This can make it hard to work with in a development environment. This plugin lets you use fully deobfuscated types, names, and fields during development, and then remaps your plugin, so it can still be used with the obfuscated server. However, this does not apply to reflection. Look at something like this library to be able to use non-obfuscated names in reflection if you want to support obfuscated servers.

Adding the plugin

Add the plugin to your build.gradle.kts file.

plugins {
  id("io.papermc.paperweight.userdev") version "<latest version here, check https://plugins.gradle.org/plugin/io.papermc.paperweight.userdev>"
}

The latest version of paperweight-userdev supports dev bundles for Minecraft 1.17.1 and newer, so it’s best practice to keep it up to date! Only the latest version of paperweight-userdev is officially supported, and we will ask you to update first if you are having problems with old versions. Furthermore, if you are having issues with paperweight-userdev, you should ask in the #build-tooling-help channel in our dedicated Discord server!

Adding the dev bundle dependency

If you try to load your Gradle project now, you will receive an error saying you have to declare a dev bundle dependency. You can do that by adding to your dependencies block in your build.gradle.kts file.

dependencies {
  // Other Dependencies
  paperweight.paperDevBundle("1.21.5-R0.1-SNAPSHOT")
}

Gradle tasks

reobfJar

This task creates a plugin JAR that is re-obfuscated to Spigot’s runtime mappings. This means it will work on standard Paper servers.

The output will be inside the build/libs folder. The JAR whose filename includes -dev is Mojang-mapped (not re-obfuscated) and will not work on most servers.

You can make the reobfJar task run on the default build task with:

tasks.assemble {
  dependsOn(tasks.reobfJar)
}

1.20.5 and beyond

As of 1.20.5, Paper ships with a Mojang-mapped runtime instead of re-obfuscating the server to Spigot mappings. Additionally, CraftBukkit classes will no longer be relocated into a versioned package. This requires plugins to be deobfuscated before loading when necessary.

Most of this process is done automatically by paperweight, but there are some important things to know when using server internals (or “NMS”) from now on.

Default mappings assumption

• By default, all Spigot/Bukkit plugins will be assumed to be Spigot-mapped if they do not specify their mappings namespace in the manifest. The other way around, all Paper plugins will be assumed to be Mojang-mapped if they do not specify their mappings namespace in the manifest.
• Spigot-mapped plugins will need to be deobfuscated on first load, Mojang-mapped plugins will not.

Compiling to Mojang mappings

If you want your main output to use Mojang mappings, you need to remove all dependsOn(reobfJar) lines and add the following code to your build script:

paperweight.reobfArtifactConfiguration = io.papermc.paperweight.userdev.ReobfArtifactConfiguration.MOJANG_PRODUCTION

Compiling to Spigot mappings

If you want your main output to use Spigot mappings, add the following code to your build script:

paperweight.reobfArtifactConfiguration = io.papermc.paperweight.userdev.ReobfArtifactConfiguration.REOBF_PRODUCTION

This is useful for plugins that have loaders for both Spigot and Paper and want to keep compatibility with both.