Changelog

The short version. Everything that matters, nothing that doesn't.

The big three

• Werewolves are in. A third faction alongside vampires and humans, with their own stages, their own hunger, and their own weakness to silver.
• Death isn't the end. Die permanently and you can stay on as a ghost, haunting the living. There is also a ritual to bring ghosts back.
• Vampires can take thralls. Humans who drink vampire blood become bound to that vampire, with everything that implies.

Also new

• 18 new abilities: 7 for vampires and 11 registered human tomes.
• Humans get roles: Vampire Hunter, Tracker and Medic, handed out at the start to people who opted in.
• Beacons are a three way war now. Werewolves can claim them too.
• Your skin changes automatically as you turn and rank up. You can now keep your current look when your vampire tier drops with /skin tierdown off.
• Cellphones are native now. Contacts, offline messages, calls, social feeds, groups, GPS, notes and seven games all live in one in-game phone.
• A setup wizard when you first join, which is also where you set what roleplay you are and aren't up for.
• The command guide is complete. Every player command is explained in the Player tab, and every staff command is explained in the Admin tab.

Want the detail? The Player tab covers gameplay and every command available to players. The Admin tab covers every staff command, configuration and the bug fixes.

How the new systems actually work, and what changed about the old ones.

Werewolves

A third faction with three stages of its own.

Two ways to be turned

By biting. A werewolf sneaks and holds onto you for 15 seconds. You are warned at 10 seconds and it completes at 15. If either of you moves more than 3.5 blocks apart, or the werewolf stops sneaking, it fails. Only one wolf can bite you at a time.

Hunger

Your hunger is shown on your experience bar. It drains from full to empty in about 20 minutes, and eating meat fills it, roughly ten pieces from empty. Fill it to be promoted a stage; let it empty and you drop one. After any stage change you get 15 minutes before it starts draining again.

Only meat counts: beef, pork, chicken, mutton, rabbit, salmon, cod, tropical fish and rotten flesh, raw or cooked.

Claws, packs and silver

• Bare fists hit harder as you rank up. No bonus at Stage 1, then ×1.5 at Stage 2 and ×2.5 at Stage 3, with a sweeping strike and a growl from Stage 2.
• Pack bonus. Werewolves within 20 blocks of each other are buffed automatically. Hunt together and you are stronger.
• Silver weakness. Iron weapons deal ×1.75 damage to a werewolf.
• Feral Charge (Stage 2+) launches you forward, 12 second cooldown. Use /pow wability.

Beacons: a three way war

Werewolves have their own beacon state, Primal, and claim beacons just as humans claim Holy and vampires claim Desecrated. The majority bonus now compares all three factions, and whichever side leads is rewarded based on how far ahead of second place it is.

Standing within 3 blocks of a beacon as an enemy of whoever is claiming it stops the claim outright, and every faction counts the other two as enemies. A vanished vampire does not block anyone, since breaking cover is the cost of interfering.

The barrier

The wall around the playable area was rebuilt.

• Spectators and ghosts pass straight through instead of being shoved around by it.
• Riding a horse or boat into it dismounts you rather than rubber-banding you and your mount.
• You cannot mount up within 2 blocks of the barrier.
• Staff can raise and lower it, and can let specific people out or keep specific people in.

The escape conditions are unchanged: cured vampires can always leave, vampires can leave once every beacon is desecrated and no survival humans remain, and humans can leave once every beacon is holy and no survival vampires remain.

New vampire powers

Seven added, on top of Bat, Lunge, Vanish, Storm Call, Shadow Travel and Vampire Vision.

The older powers changed too:

• Vanish now tells you how many attacks you have left before it breaks, and cannot be used in bat form.
• Storm Call warns you 60 seconds before the storm runs out, so you are not caught in daylight.
• Bat form lasts 3 minutes at Stage 3, up from 2.
• Shadow Travel can be set to require full health.

New tome abilities

Eleven registered for humans, several of them direct answers to the new vampire powers.

Holy Word also changed: a paralysed vampire can no longer climb onto a horse or into a boat to escape it.

Fae bargains

Staff can mark a player as Fae, unlocking bargains that pin a human to a chosen vampire stage. A bargain can optionally be tied to the Fae's permanent life; when that Fae dies, the deal breaks according to server settings. Bargains can also govern death counts, turning permission and whether the target may be turned.

• Fae-created vampires cannot promote or demote outside their bargained stage.
• They keep a safe minimum blood value instead of repeatedly crossing a stage boundary.
• Staff can choose whether a broken bargain restores humanity, marks the player cured, or merely removes the stage lock.

Cellphones

The old CellPhone Skript has been ported into the plugin. Hold the phone and right-click to open it; shift-right-click another player to add their active character as a contact. See the complete cellphone guide for controls and limits.

• Communication: favorites, nicknames, blocking, offline direct messages, unread totals, paging, transcript exports, group chats and character-based social handles.
• Calls: private/group Simple Voice Chat calls, DND, mute, deafen, missed calls and two-way speakerphone without replacing proximity chat.
• Utilities: 50 GPS pins with sharing and direction tracking, 100 private notes, nine phone colors and per-player notification/refresh settings.
• Games: Blackjack, Higher or Lower, Memory, 112-word Wordle, Connect Four, Tic-Tac-Toe and Rock Paper Scissors, with chips, wagers, records and leaderboards.
• Migration: all eight legacy Skript YAML files import once into atomic phone-data.json; the originals are kept as a recovery source.

Thralls and blood bonds

A vampire can bottle their own blood, and a human who drinks it becomes that vampire's thrall. The bond deepens with each dose: 1 bottle reaches Stage 1, 3 reaches Stage 2, 6 reaches Stage 3. A vampire can hold up to 3 thralls, and a thrall can be bound to two masters at once.

Orders do not always work. The chance depends on the bond: 50% at Stage 1, 80% at Stage 2, guaranteed at Stage 3. Masters can command, root, punish and track their thralls.

Being a thrall costs you:

• Withdrawal. An hour after your last dose a countdown starts, then recurring poison until you are fed again.
• Separation anxiety (Stage 2+) if you stray more than 150 blocks from your master.
• Holy water weakens the bond, two bottles' worth per splash.
• At Stage 3 you get a choice: swear yourself to vampirism, or don't.

Blood bottles

Three kinds of blood now, and who you are decides what happens when you drink one. All of them are drunk rather than thrown.

Human roles

Humans are no longer identical. Three roles are handed out at random to players who opted in. Hunter and Tracker are mutually exclusive, and any role is lost the moment you become a vampire.

Ghosts and haunting

Dying permanently no longer means logging off. You choose between being a normal spectator or haunting the lands: flying, invisible, passing through walls, still part of the story.

• You cannot break or place blocks, use items, or pick things up.
• You can open doors, levers, buttons and chests, enough to rattle a room, but not move anything in or out.
• /ghost show <player> reveals you to one person only.
• /ghost haunt <player> routes your voice chat to that person alone.

The Rite of Return

A ritual that drags a ghost back into the living world. Four books teach it, and reading them is how you learn the conditions: it needs vampire blood, it must happen at night, it requires a desecrated beacon, and the fourth book reveals the price.

The reviver holds a vial of vampire blood, stands at a desecrated beacon with the ghost within 25 blocks, and performs it after dark. What comes back is up to staff: a vampire, a human, a thrall, or a ghoul.

Other things you will notice

• The cure traces your bloodline. It no longer stops at your direct sire; it walks up the chain as far as staff have configured. A sire in spectator mode breaks the chain.
• Vampires can no longer gain Strength from any source.
• You cannot feed on a player who is not in survival mode, and a feed in progress is cancelled if they leave it.
• Turning switches off automatically after a new vampire is made, so turns cannot chain instantly through a group.
• Permanent death is announced anonymously, with no name attached.
• Selected tome abilities can survive turning. Staff can allow named abilities (or all of them), and separately decide whether physical tome items remain usable.
• You can permakill yourself with /pow permakill, behind a confirmation.
• Vampires respawn at the crypt. Humans keep their bed only if it is in the world currently running.
• Silver arrows. A silver (iron) ingot on top, a stick in the middle, an arrow at the bottom, vertically, gives 2. They are spectral arrows without the glow, so you can shoot without lighting your target up for the whole server.
• Real vault blocks around the map hold tome and cure books, opened with Trial Keys, once per player.
• Your skin changes as you rise and fall through the vampire stages, and is restored when you are cured. Register your own with /skin register. Use /skin tierdown off if promotions should change your skin but demotions should keep the look you already have; the choice survives reconnects.

Every player command

These are all commands players can use. Some only work while you are a vampire, werewolf, Fae, thrall, master, ghost, role holder, or after learning the matching ritual.

Everything, including the things players never see. Assumes you have read the Player tab.

Before you update

Server version. Built against Paper 1.21.10, declaring 1.21.5 as the minimum. Several menus use Paper's native dialog windows, so an older Paper will not run it.

The plugin is renamed to WerePires. Bukkit now uses plugins/WerePires/. On first startup, files missing there are copied from plugins/VampireSMP/; current files are never overwritten and the old folder is preserved as a backup. Permission plugins, soft-depends and scripts that use the old plugin name still need checking.

Config compatibility. Every 1.0.6 setting still exists, spelled the same. Hundreds of new settings use defaults matching the old hardcoded behavior, so an old config keeps working while gaining the new sections.

Starting a game: /pow admin init

Rebuilt from a single chest menu into a full wizard. It opens with a warning listing what init destroys (player tags and inventories, all beacons neutralised, session reset, everyone teleported, new vampires assigned), then walks through vampire assignment mode, vampire count or min/max, a paged player picker, role counts, session mode, half length, series break, build phase, break schedule, break duration, break looping, what happens after the break, starter kits, and a final confirm. Nothing applies until you confirm.

Every admin command

This is the complete staff command reference, including administrative subcommands that do not live under /pow admin. Normal player commands remain in the Player tab.

World templates

Named map templates live in plugins/WerePires/worlds/, each carrying its own config overrides, beacon layout and session defaults. /pow admin loadworld swaps the live map without a restart: players are moved to a holding area, the world is replaced, everyone is returned to the new spawn, and that world's settings are applied. An _EXAMPLE folder is generated on first run.

New config sections

The original keys remain compatible, while hundreds of new controls replace hardcoded values.

Tuning that used to be hardcoded

• Every tome has two switches: enabled or not, and in the loot pool or not. Stop the Bleeding ships working but unfindable, handed out with /pow admin givetome.
• Tomes can hook events, which is what makes on-hit abilities like Blessed Blade possible at all.
• All 15 original tomes now expose radius, durations, effect levels, damage and channel times.
• Vampire abilities take per-stage values for cooldown, duration, power and attack limits.
• An unknown tome name in the loot list now warns you by name at startup instead of silently producing empty chests.

Complete fork inventory

Audited against the supplied VampireSMP 1.0.6 JAR. This is the complete fork inventory, not a cellphone-only release: all 185 Java files and every changed build/resource file were checked, and the detailed ledger names every branch-changed source file.

Complete command and code audit

The branch name says cellphone, but the audit covers all 185 Java files. It checks every command route, permission, manager, listener, service, registration and shutdown hook.

Bugs fixed from 1.0.6

Re-audited against the supplied VampireSMP 1.0.6 JAR and the current 1.15.12 source, class by class and system by system: 185 Java files, 35 Bukkit command roots, 58 listener-capable classes, 40 concrete abilities, 50 managers and 42 explicit lifecycle owners. Original configuration keys remain compatible while hundreds of new controls have been added.