Dominus

V15 — Abilities & Autonomy (66 fixes, 48 improvements)

• The plugin now maintains itself: automatic timestamped backups of the data folder (retention, time-limited activation, restore applied at the next startup with the archive validated before anything is wiped), auto-update of the jar from the GitHub releases, and automatic verification of config.yml and the data files against the reference schema — missing keys added, unknown ones reported, invalid values reset, canonical ordering rewritten.
• Added /dominus patchnote, which brings these release notes into the console from a local cache refreshed at boot, so it still works offline.
• The mob palette: a paginated menu to disguise as any mob type in the game, whether one is nearby or not — opened from the Mob Mode hotbar, from the inventory while disguised, or through /dominus palette [overworld|nether|end], which accepts a dimension category to open it directly. Mobs are listed in creative-inventory order, identical in every language.
• Real mob abilities: guardian and elder guardian lasers (the true vanilla beam driven through the disguise watcher), wither skulls with their charged variant, evoker fangs and vex summoning, illusioner bow, mirror images and blindness spell, bogged poisoned arrows, allay item carrying, and the mount kick — all governed by vanilla cooldowns under vanilla_fidelity.
• The wither disguise became a full boss fight: second phase below half health with armor and block destruction, wither effect scaled by difficulty on both melee and skulls, wither roses planted where its victims fall, nether star dropped on death, immunity to arrows and tridents in phase two, and a boss bar shown to nearby players — with a new show_boss_bar option covering the ender dragon as well, and the bar never displayed to the Dominus carrying it.
• Passive fidelity per species: out-of-water timers specific to each aquatic mob that survive re-disguising and only recharge in water (guardians no longer suffocate on land), armadillos rolling into a ball at vanilla threats, real armadillos no longer treating a Dominus as a danger, and snow golems leaving a snow trail under the actual vanilla conditions.
• Other players can now interact with a disguised Dominus's body: shearing the snow golem's pumpkin (which drops), brushing a scute off the armadillo, saddling a disguised horse or pig, feeding a disguised mount, taming it the vanilla way before it accepts a saddle, and riding it without ever gaining control of it.
• Death messages no longer expose a disguised Dominus's name — the mob's name or the Sonic Boom message is shown instead — and are filtered per observer according to hide_presence.
• Hotbars were reworked from scratch: World Mode and Mob Mode each fit entirely within nine slots and switch through a dedicated item in slot 9 or /dominus switch, the gamemode toggle, the grower/ungrower and the fire spreader were dropped, and the disguised layout is now fixed and never shifts — the mob palette and the mount-swap saddle moved to the last inventory slots, where they trigger on click.
• Entities no longer push a Dominus around, interaction reach scales with the disguise so large mobs can hit and interact without obstruction, and projectiles now hit disguises wider than the player's hitbox instead of passing straight through them.
• Mob names in all five languages were realigned on the official Mojang names, and Overworld, Nether and End are proper nouns left untranslated everywhere, language files and READMEs alike.
• Mount limitations acknowledged rather than papered over: rider-visible health synchronization, the jump charge gauge and mount inventory access were each attempted, proven unreachable server-side, and entirely removed. The rider is only hidden when hide_mount_riders is enabled, which remains the sole way to restore mining and attacks while carrying a passenger.
• Robustness: a re-entrance lock stops a second event in the same tick from acting on the freshly rebuilt hotbar, the ender dragon left behind at undisguise reappears above the player in circling phase instead of trapping them in its hitbox, riders are dismounted and resynchronized when a disguised Dominus disconnects, deflected ghast fireballs become a real threat to their sender again, mobs created from the palette are never left behind, and a server shutdown no longer leaves a Dominus wearing its mob's attributes.