SimpleSkills - User Guide

This guide provides step-by-step instructions for getting started with SimpleSkills and covers common usage scenarios.

Table of Contents

• Getting Started
• Skills Overview
• Common Scenarios
  • Checking Your Skills
  • Leveling Up a Skill
  • Viewing Skill Details
  • Checking the Leaderboard
• How Progress Is Saved
• Tips and Best Practices

Getting Started

Understanding the Basics

SimpleSkills adds a skill progression system to Minecraft. As you perform in-game activities, your corresponding skills gain experience and level up. Higher skill levels unlock beneficial effects that enhance gameplay.

Key Concepts:

• Skills – Each skill is tied to a specific activity (e.g., Mining, Farming, Fishing).
• Experience (EXP) – Performing the activity associated with a skill grants experience.
• Levels – Accumulating enough experience causes a skill to level up.
• Benefits – At higher levels, skills can trigger special rewards (e.g., auto-smelting ores, double drops, speed boosts).

First Steps

1. Join a server with SimpleSkills installed.
2. Perform any in-game activity (mining, farming, fishing, etc.) to start gaining experience.
3. Run /ss info to see your current skill levels.
4. Run /ss help to see a full list of available commands.

Skills Overview

SimpleSkills includes 20 skills, each tied to a specific activity. Benefits trigger with a chance based on skill level.

A server owner can switch off any skill entirely, or switch off just its benefit while leaving its levelling intact. See Skill Activation and Skill Benefit Toggles.

Common Scenarios

Checking Your Skills

Goal: View your current skill levels and experience.

Steps:

1. Run /ss info to see all your skills, their current level, and experience progress.
2. To view another player's skills, run /ss info <playerName>.

Example output:

=== Skills of Steve ===
Mining - LVL: 15 - EXP: 230/257
Farming - LVL: 8 - EXP: 45/121
Lumberjack - LVL: 3 - EXP: 10/37

The number after the slash is the experience needed to reach the next level, which grows with the level a skill is already at. See Experience Requirements for the curve and the settings that shape it.

Leveling Up a Skill

Goal: Increase your level in a specific skill.

Steps:

1. Identify the activity associated with the skill you want to level (see Skills Overview).
2. Perform that activity repeatedly to accumulate experience.
3. When you have enough experience, you will level up and see a level-up message in chat.
4. Run /ss info to confirm your new level.

Example: To level up Mining, mine ore blocks using a pickaxe.

Viewing Skill Details

Goal: Learn more about a specific skill's configuration.

Steps:

1. Run /ss skill <skillName> to see the skill's current status, max level, base experience requirement, and experience increase factor.

Example:

/ss skill Mining

Example output:

=== Mining ===
Active: true
Max Level: 100
Base Experience Requirement: 10
Experience Increase Factor: 1.2

The three settings shown are read from config.yml, so a server whose values differ from the shipped defaults reports its own. What they mean is covered in Experience Requirements.

Checking the Leaderboard

Goal: See who the top players are in a skill.

Steps:

1. Run /ss top <skillName> to see the top players in that skill.
2. Run /ss top to see overall top players.

Example:

/ss top Mining

Example output:

Top Players in Mining
1: Steve - LVL: 42
2: Alex - LVL: 37
3: Notch - LVL: 25

How Progress Is Saved

Skill levels and experience are held in memory while the server runs and written to plugins/SimpleSkills/playerRecords.json. That file is rewritten:

• When the server shuts down cleanly. A clean shutdown always writes the current state.
• Every 5 minutes. A scheduled autosave runs in the background from 5 minutes after startup onward.
• Whenever the server saves a world. This covers the server's own periodic world autosave and an operator running /save-all.

Because a server fires its save once per world, several worlds saving together would otherwise rewrite the file several times in a row; consecutive saves less than 5 seconds apart are therefore collapsed into a single write.

The practical effect for players is that a server crash costs at most the progress made since the server last saved, rather than since the plugin's own last autosave. No player action is needed to save progress.

Tips and Best Practices

• Focus on one skill at a time to reach higher levels faster and unlock benefits sooner.
• Mining and Woodcutting are great starter skills since those activities are very common in early gameplay.
• Farming with auto-replant makes sustained farming much more efficient at higher levels.
• Hardiness is useful for survival servers since it can reduce or negate incoming damage.
• Run /ss stats to see server-wide statistics, including the total number of skills and player records.