v4.0.0-beta.2 - Continuation of Isolate Default Leashable Mobs Update

ℹ️ This is a BETA Release

This update includes significant changes. While extensive testing has been performed, some bugs may still be present.

❗ BREAKING CHANGE - Tether only supports Paper now (and direct forks)

As of this release, 4.0.0-beta.2, Tether has moved off of the Spigot API and over to the Paper API. Development of this update uncovered the need to make this change.

What This Means For You

❗ Tether will no longer work on plain Spigot servers, and will only work on Paper (or Paper-based) servers (like Purpur).

Estimated affected audience:
Basically no one. For years Paper has been the gold standard Minecraft server. No one really runs a plain Spigot server anymore anyways.

(See more below).

Why?

Paper has always been a direct superset of Spigot, meaning all Spigot plugins will work on Paper. However, in 2024 Paper officially stopped this commitment and moved away from relying on Spigot so that they may become independent and move more quickly.

Things still continued be compatible for a while though, until eventually certain plugins would run into a point where the differences mattered. This was the case for Tether recently, as Paper changed things to do with leashing under the hood that no longer matched Spigot.

These situations leave developers like me with a few options:

• A. Stop supporting Paper and stick with Spigot. (Yeah, no way).
• B. Develop two streams of the plugin, one for plain Spigot and one for Paper.
• C. Abandon plain Spigot entirely and go all in on Paper and paper-based servers.

I of course chose option C. Option B, while valid, is too much work (for me at least). Especially considering the fact that the vast majority of Minecraft servers nowadays run Paper or some paper-based server (like Pupur). Almost no one is running a plain Spigot server. So that would be wasted effort.

Option C is the clear winner here.

Bug Fix: Non-mob Entities Are Ignored by Tether

Fixed a bug introduced in the 4.0.0 update where non-mob entities, like boats, would be ignored by tether.

Config Changes

Updated verbiage from “default leashable mobs” to “default leashable entities”.

Config changes:

• DEFAULT_LEASHABLE_MOBS value has been changed to DEFAULT_LEASHABLE_ENTITIES
  • Backwards compatibility has been added for this.
• blacklisted-mobs and whitelisted-mobs have changed to entity-blacklist and entity-whitelist.
  • Backwards compatibility has been added for this.

Thanks @ Ken in my Discord for pointing this out!