Bukkit

Note: Librarian doesn’t currently work; the problems have been verified on other servers and a patch is in the works.

Are you a helpful admin at your wits end at repeat questions? How about someone running a themed server? Tired of fruitlessly trying to tell people to leave Minecraft and go read some writeup you’ve made but nobody does anyway?

The solution is simple.

The solution is Librarian!

Librarian allows the creation of signs which, when right clicked, will display the contents of a text file to the person who right clicked it. Whoever is in charge of the server simply puts whatever books they want in the library in simple text files, and anyone can create a sign invoking that text file! Now you can build a Library somewhere in your spawn city or starting area, populate it with Librarian signs, and simply tell people to visit it when they need help with something. You can even TP them there (using other plugins of course), which means they’re far more likely to get read (and you won’t have to repeatedly explain things to them).

Installation

Unzip or unrar the provided archive (if using a normal .zip download) directly in to your Bukkit server’s directory. This will leave you with both librarian.jar and a Librarian directory installed to your Bukkit server. Two example files are provided to show you how it works, these are “plugins/Librarian/skrylar.txt” and “plugins/Librarian/example/funtimes.txt”.

Alternate Installation

Ensure “librarian.jar” is within your Bukkit installation’s plugins directory, then create a directory named “Librarian” along side the jar. Your bookfiles go within this Librarian directory.

Creating Bookfiles

Whomever has access to the Bukkit installation simply creates plain text files inside the Librarian directory. These files may only have simple names consisting of numbers, lowercase A-Z, and the dash, or else you will not be able to access them from within the game. This naming restriction is put in place to protect the server from users reading files they should not by using special characters. Note that bookfiles are sent verbatim in this release, you will need to make any aesthetic line breaks on your own as no line wrapping is done by this version.

Creating Librarian Signs

Simply create a sign and put [Librarian] in as the first line. The second line may either be the name of a bookfile in the Librarian directory, or the name of a directory inside of it. If you chose to make the second line a directory, the third line must be the name of a bookfile within that directory. Anything you place on the fourth line will be overridden with (Right-click me!) to indicate to users unfamiliar with Librarian that they need to right click the sign to read it.

To use the provided skrylar.txt file, you would create a sign like this:

[Librarian]
Skrylar

To use the provided example/funtimes.txt file, you would create a sign like this:

[Librarian]
Example
Fun Times

Note that any character that is not valid (only 0-9, A-Z and the dash are valid) is simply removed when looking up a book, and all names are changed to lowercase. This means that “Fun Times” is identical to “fUNtiMeS” or “f u n times”; all of these will try to read funtimes.txt. Do note that Unix servers are particular about the casing of filenames, so you should be warned that improper naming of bookfiles may work on Windows but will mysteriously break on your Ubuntu machines.

Commands

Librarian doesn’t add any new commands to your server that may be used through chat; it’s primary usage is through [Librarian] signs.

Permissions

Librarian doesn’t have any permissions, since the only people who are able to create Librarian bookfiles are those who have physical access to the server’s installation. There are only two permissions that would even apply to Librarian in its current state: the ability to create a sign and the ability to read a sign. If an actual need for either of these rises (or admins start asking for it) they will be added.