SnCompanions - SnDevelopment

SnCompanions gives every player a squad of companions that follow them in a straight line behind them, at their feet - or, one key away, on an arc cut from a circle or from an oval that hugs their back. The formation rotates with the owner's camera, so the companions always stay in view. Companions are drawn with packets instead of entities, so they never collide, never despawn and never wander off. The whole server shares one animation tick, so companion count adds no scheduler tasks and unequipped companions cost nothing.

A companion is more than a cosmetic. It levels up from a configurable experience source and grants its owner damage, resistance and speed buffs that scale with its level. Players collect companions from weighted companion eggs, fuse duplicates into stronger ones, and manage everything from configurable menus.

Features

Packet formation - a straight line behind the owner, or an arc cut from a circle or an oval - with configurable spacing, distance, radius, back radius, arc width, height and bob.
Levels and experience per companion type, with per-type level caps and a choice of six experience sources: vanilla XP, blocks, EdTools omnitool breaks, mobs, damage dealt or playtime. Since 1.10.0 a companion is created at level 0, so its first level is earned like every level after it.
Damage, resistance and speed buffs, each with a global cap and a per-world gate.
Fusion: combine duplicates into a stronger companion that inherits levels, with a server-wide announcement you can switch on per companion.
Companion eggs with weighted tables, price tiers charged in Vault, in one of your EdTools currencies, or in several at once, a Dragon Egg hatch show and per-egg cooldowns. An egg is a purchase, not an item: the table rolls the moment it is opened and the companions land straight in the owner's storage. A missing economy refuses the purchase instead of giving the egg away, and a purchase whose companions cannot be saved is refunded in full.
An in-game eggs shop, /companions eggs [egg] or the egg button of the storage menu: every companion the egg can give with its live odds, and one button per price tier. One menu file serves every egg you declare.
A hatch show on every open: a Dragon Egg appears in front of the buyer, shakes faster and faster, breaks and reveals the companion they won. Drawn with packets like the companions themselves, so nothing is spawned and nothing can be walked into - and any player who would rather not watch it switches it off for themselves from the eggs menu.
Companion items, off by default since 1.11.0: switched on, shift + right click a stored companion, or press Q over it, to take it out as a physical head carrying its whole state, and right click it back into a storage. The head remembers who took it out, and only that player can redeem it, so moving a companion to another owner is an admin action. Left off, a companion never leaves its owner's storage as an object.
Holograms: configurable text above every companion, per companion type, drawn as packet entities that RIDE the companion, so the text and the companion can never move at different times.
A Bedrock fallback, on by default since 1.12.0: a player on Bedrock is sent a fake baby zombie wearing that companion's own head plus leather armour, moved by the same arithmetic as the real companion and carrying the same name plate, because the Display entity every companion body is drawn with has no Bedrock definition at all and Geyser drops it without a word. The head is what those players see whichever backend the companion uses, so a companion that renders as a BetterModel model reaches them as its head rather than as the animated model - give every companion a head texture if your server has Bedrock players. Java players receive byte for byte what they received before and see no change whatsoever. Floodgate is optional, and is what tells the plugin who is on Bedrock. Since 1.13.0 each companion can give that zombie its own leather colour with bedrock.armor-color in its file, so the outfit matches the head.
Four menus you can re-skin without touching code, with a per-group colour every companion template can draw with.
Equipped companions are kept in slots 1..n with no gap, so the free slots are always the last ones.
A developer API in the same jar: a read-only query service plus eight Bukkit events, five of them cancellable.

Optional integrations

PlaceholderAPI: registers the %sncompanions_...% expansion for scoreboards, tab and holograms. Without it the plugin runs normally and simply skips the expansion.
BetterModel: lets a companion type render as an animated model with separate idle and moving animations. Without it every companion renders as a player head, which is the built-in default.
Floodgate: tells the plugin which players are on Bedrock, so those players can be sent the baby-zombie substitute instead of a Display entity their client cannot be shown. It is asked once per player, on their join, and never from the animation tick. Without Floodgate every player counts as a Java client and the whole bedrock band of config.yml does nothing - on a Geyser server that means Bedrock players keep seeing nothing where their companions are. Installing or removing it on a running server needs no restart: the plugin re-asks every online player and rebuilds every formation one tick later.
EdTools: lets an equipped companion grant EdTools currency boosters and the global enchant multiplier, summed across every equipped companion, with an optional per-companion max: ceiling on each entry. It also unlocks the EDTOOLS_BLOCK_BREAK experience source, so a companion can level from the blocks an EdTools omnitool consumes - blocks a vanilla BlockBreakEvent never sees. Without it nothing is granted, that source earns nothing, no EdTools class is ever loaded and the plugin runs normally.

Links

Source and releases: part of the shared Sn-Releases repo

Features

Packet formation - a straight line behind the owner, or an arc cut from a circle or an oval - with configurable spacing, distance, radius, back radius, arc width, height and bob.

Levels and experience per companion type, with per-type level caps and a choice of six experience sources: vanilla XP, blocks, EdTools omnitool breaks, mobs, damage dealt or playtime. Since 1.10.0 a companion is created at level 0, so its first level is earned like every level after it.

Damage, resistance and speed buffs, each with a global cap and a per-world gate.

Fusion: combine duplicates into a stronger companion that inherits levels, with a server-wide announcement you can switch on per companion.

Companion eggs with weighted tables, price tiers charged in Vault, in one of your EdTools currencies, or in several at once, a Dragon Egg hatch show and per-egg cooldowns. An egg is a purchase, not an item: the table rolls the moment it is opened and the companions land straight in the owner's storage. A missing economy refuses the purchase instead of giving the egg away, and a purchase whose companions cannot be saved is refunded in full.

An in-game eggs shop, /companions eggs [egg] or the egg button of the storage menu: every companion the egg can give with its live odds, and one button per price tier. One menu file serves every egg you declare.

A hatch show on every open: a Dragon Egg appears in front of the buyer, shakes faster and faster, breaks and reveals the companion they won. Drawn with packets like the companions themselves, so nothing is spawned and nothing can be walked into - and any player who would rather not watch it switches it off for themselves from the eggs menu.

Companion items, off by default since 1.11.0: switched on, shift + right click a stored companion, or press Q over it, to take it out as a physical head carrying its whole state, and right click it back into a storage. The head remembers who took it out, and only that player can redeem it, so moving a companion to another owner is an admin action. Left off, a companion never leaves its owner's storage as an object.

Holograms: configurable text above every companion, per companion type, drawn as packet entities that RIDE the companion, so the text and the companion can never move at different times.

A Bedrock fallback, on by default since 1.12.0: a player on Bedrock is sent a fake baby zombie wearing that companion's own head plus leather armour, moved by the same arithmetic as the real companion and carrying the same name plate, because the Display entity every companion body is drawn with has no Bedrock definition at all and Geyser drops it without a word. The head is what those players see whichever backend the companion uses, so a companion that renders as a BetterModel model reaches them as its head rather than as the animated model - give every companion a head texture if your server has Bedrock players. Java players receive byte for byte what they received before and see no change whatsoever. Floodgate is optional, and is what tells the plugin who is on Bedrock. Since 1.13.0 each companion can give that zombie its own leather colour with bedrock.armor-color in its file, so the outfit matches the head.

Four menus you can re-skin without touching code, with a per-group colour every companion template can draw with.

Equipped companions are kept in slots 1..n with no gap, so the free slots are always the last ones.

A developer API in the same jar: a read-only query service plus eight Bukkit events, five of them cancellable.

Optional integrations

PlaceholderAPI: registers the %sncompanions_...% expansion for scoreboards, tab and holograms. Without it the plugin runs normally and simply skips the expansion.

BetterModel: lets a companion type render as an animated model with separate idle and moving animations. Without it every companion renders as a player head, which is the built-in default.

Floodgate: tells the plugin which players are on Bedrock, so those players can be sent the baby-zombie substitute instead of a Display entity their client cannot be shown. It is asked once per player, on their join, and never from the animation tick. Without Floodgate every player counts as a Java client and the whole bedrock band of config.yml does nothing - on a Geyser server that means Bedrock players keep seeing nothing where their companions are. Installing or removing it on a running server needs no restart: the plugin re-asks every online player and rebuilds every formation one tick later.

EdTools: lets an equipped companion grant EdTools currency boosters and the global enchant multiplier, summed across every equipped companion, with an optional per-companion max: ceiling on each entry. It also unlocks the EDTOOLS_BLOCK_BREAK experience source, so a companion can level from the blocks an EdTools omnitool consumes - blocks a vanilla BlockBreakEvent never sees. Without it nothing is granted, that source earns nothing, no EdTools class is ever loaded and the plugin runs normally.