Essentials Updated

I have updated Essentials on the server to a much later version of the plugin, with all the legwork done by Telesphoreo. This is probably the first time in a very long while that the version of the plugin on the server is in parity with the version that is on the AMG GitHub repository.

I have also forced the server to regenerate the items.json file (which is what the plugin uses to store a list of every item in the game for commands like /give and /item), which means you are finally able to give yourself 1.17 items with Essentials commands.

In addition to the major version upgrade, Telesphoreo also took the time to fix long-standing bugs with the commands /getpos, /near, and /ignore. These commands had problems in some form or another, which have now been properly fixed. The first two commands were blocked because of the issues they previously had, so they have since been unblocked now that the issues have been resolved.

Finally, administrators now have the ability to teleport to offline players with the /otp command. This was a long-requested feature since at least March 2021, so it's been long overdue.

Unfortunately, the downside to this update is that Essentials mail from before the update seems to have been broken, so you'll likely need to clear your mail for it to display properly again. This is a side-effect of some changes the EssentialsX made to the mail system. If you want a copy of the mail before you clear it, DM me on Discord and I will send the raw mail data to you.

I'll look into updating more plugins over the week.

I didn't mention this in the original post because I wasn't sure when we'd be able to resolve it and I wasn't sure if this could cause additional problems, but it turns out that 2.20.0 changed how Essentials caches usernames and UUIDs. This wouldn't have been noteworthy if it wasn't for the fact that it ended up causing problems for us, because instead of converting the tried-and-true usermap.csv file, the Essentials developers decided to take the opportunity to read all player data and build the usermap entirely from scratch. You would have assumed that this approach would have worked, right? Right?

Wrong. This approach broke several commands related to offline players like /eseen and /home, because the conversion was incomplete and shitty and resulted in data either not being fetched properly or at all, even though user data is present in the folder. So, for the sake of documentation, this is how I fixed the issue. I created a very quick Java application that reads through the old usermap.csv file (which was used in EssentialsX 2.19.x and older) and converts it to the new format. Afterwards, all I had to do was restart the server and replace the usermap.bin with the one from the converter. The issues we were running into were instantly resolved.

To help those who end up in the same shitty circumstances as I did, I've put my converter on GitHub under the Unlicense license: https://github.com/VideoGameSmash12/ESUMC