Added

• PlaceholderAPI support (papi-output) for chat formatting and placeholders.
• Recommended default configuration for LuckPerms Chat Formatter (LPC) setup.

Fixed

• An issue where LPC 4.x dropped or failed to send chat messages.

Removed

• Nothing

Added

• Automatic documentation sync with https://busybeedev.net/docs/chatcolor/intro.

Fixed

• An issue where modified game clients sending raw color symbols (§) caused chat formatting to break or show raw code text.

Removed

• Nothing

Added

• The option to hide player permissions in the menu interface
• A clear notification message when a player attempts to open a menu without the required permissions
• Support for HeadDatabase (HDB) custom heads in menus, if installed

Fixed

• None

Removed

• None

Added

• Added support for the /colors command alias.

Fixed

• Improved stability and reliability when handling dynamic placeholders.

Removed

• Removed the /cc command alias.

Added • Support for custom hex colors (like #FF5733) in the /color set command! • Hex color code suggestions while typing the command.

Fix • Corrected color display issues when changing chat styles.

Remove • None

Added

• Automatic preservation of your custom game settings when installing new updates
• Automatic background cleanup of old settings backups

Fixed

• Issue where updating the game could reset saved player preferences and options

Removed

• Obsolete settings files and outdated configuration backups

Added

• /color debug command to test and troubleshoot chat color settings.
• Updated player and staff documentation regarding chat features and permissions. Click Here to view new updated docs.

Fixed

• Chat message formatting stability and detection issues.

Removed

• None

Added

• chat-hook option in config.yml to configure chat event integration (AUTO, MODERN, LEGACY).
• Improved player display name support across chat configurations.

Fixed

• Chat event handling reliability and event listener registration.
• Data saving and loading synchronization to ensure thread safety and stability.
• Configuration loading performance and internal data handling.

Removed

• None

Special Thanks to tinseltuner (Docker) for bringing the issue to my attention.

Added

• safeSetItem method for improved slot validation in GUI item setting logic

Fixed

• Exception handling in ColorUtil to catch Throwable instead of generic Exception
• Legacy text parsing in ColorUtil for improved compatibility

Removed

• Nothing

Added

• Enhanced MiniMessage support in ColorUtil for smoother tag parsing (gradients, rainbow, hover/click events) and safer fallback handling for invalid tags.
• Expanded HEX color support in ColorUtil with broader pattern recognition (&#RRGGBB, #RRGGBB, and <color:#RRGGBB>).

Fixed

• Overhauled legacy text handling in ColorUtil to properly process & and § codes and prevent formatting leaks across wrapped chat messages.
• Fixed bug in ChatListener where message color processing could unintentionally override player prefixes or group ranks.
• Resolved double-parsing issues during chat events by streamlining format assembly logic.

Removed

• Removed redundant legacy formatting passes in ChatListener to optimize chat event processing speed and reduce server overhead.

Added

• Nothing

Fixed

• Console filter cleanup when the plugin disables (prevents shutdown errors)

Removed

• Nothing

Updated ChatColors Docs. Please make sure to take a look.

✨ Enhancements & Fixes

• 🎨 Improved Color & Placeholder Application: Refactored internal formatting logic to ensure smoother, glitch-free color application and more reliable placeholder processing.
• ⚡ Priority Detection Overhaul: Rewrote color priority evaluation for a more consistent experience across rank and permission setups.
• 🔌 Enhanced Plugin Compatibility:
  • Improved integrations and smooth operation alongside EssentialsChat.
  • Upgraded PlaceholderAPI handling for reliable expansion parsing and seamless text injection.

⚙️ Engine & Under the Hood

• Modernized Core Architecture: Fully refactored internal models and core classes (removed Lombok dependencies) to increase maintainability, performance, and memory efficiency.
• Dependency Updates:
  • Updated PlaceholderAPI target to 2.12.3.
  • Updated Bukkit / API target to 0.28.0.

🎨 Chat & Visual Updates

• Vibrant New Colors & Gradients: We've massively upgraded our text coloring system! You'll now see smoother color gradients, dynamic text patterns, and much more consistent formatting across chat and menus.
• Smarter Color Handling: Improved how the system handles default colors. This eliminates weird formatting glitches and ensures text looks exactly how it should, even when mixing custom colors.
• For Server Owners & Devs: We've expanded the ChatColorAPI with brand new tools and improved the documentation, making it easier than ever to customize server text and build colorful add-ons!

🛠️ Performance & Stability

• Smoother Menus & Inventories: We've overhauled the background code that handles custom menus (FastInvManager). By modernizing the logic, opening custom containers and clicking through interfaces is now faster, more stable, and less likely to cause lag or micro-stutters.

🚀 FEATURES

• Configurable Element Toggles: Added new toggle options inside config.yml to completely control the visibility and loading of standard colors, gradients, and patterns.
• Dynamic Content Loading: Rewrote the color engine to conditionally load elements depending on your active config settings, reducing unnecessary memory allocation.

🐛 FIXES & IMPROVEMENTS

• Automatic Config Self-Healing: Implemented a failsafe mechanism that automatically re-adds any missing keys or sections to config.yml without overriding your existing settings.
• Enhanced Performance: Optimizing configuration checks ensures smoother server startup times when parsing active formatting modules.

🚀 FEATURES

• EssentialsC Compatibility: Full formatting integration added for servers running EssentialsC.
• Event-Priority Controls: Added a new event-priority option to the configuration file, allowing you to fine-tune how ChatColors interacts with other chat-altering plugins.
• Late-Bind Config Option: Introduced a late-bind toggle to delay plugin initialization, ensuring perfect compatibility with late-loading chat management suites.
• Beta: Emojis from Nexo should work.

🐛 FIXES & IMPROVEMENTS

• Enhanced Debugging: The plugin now explicitly logs the active listener priority on startup, making it much easier to isolate chat conflicts.
• Updated FastStats for better reporting on errors.
• Documentation Overhaul: The official wiki has been fully updated! Check out the improved command details, permission tables, and config setup at https://busybeedev.net/docs/chatcolor/introduction

🚀 Features & Enhancements

• Smart Chat & Event Priority Handling:
  • Updated config.yml to recommend the MONITOR event priority, significantly improving out-of-the-box compatibility with EssentialsX.
  • Implemented automatic priority adjustment logic to seamlessly handle EssentialsChat compatibility without breaking formatting.

🛠️ Fixes & Improvements

• Internal refactoring: Introduced a new internal helper method (isFastInv) to streamline how the plugin detects custom menus.
• Enhanced Stability: Improved safety checks to prevent rare null-pointer exceptions when players interact with non-plugin inventories.
• Code Clean-up: Optimized inventory type handling, making future menu updates faster and easier to implement.

📝 Note for Server Admins

If you are upgrading from an older version, your old gui.yml and players.yml have automatically been migrated to the new /configs/ folder. You can safely delete any orphaned colors.yml or patterns.yml files in the root plugin directory!

🌟 New Features & Enhancements

• Next-Gen Server Support: Full compatibility added for Folia (multi-threaded servers) and Canvas. Expect seamless, lag-free color formatting no matter what engine your server runs on.
• Overhauled Color Systems: We’ve introduced a new custom asset system. Managing your Gradients and Patterns is now entirely separated, meaning more unique and stable chat colors are coming your way soon.

🛠️ Menu & GUI Refurbishing

• Snappier Menus: The entire Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been rewritten from scratch. Color menus will load instantly with zero click delay.
• Unified Localizations: Menus now adapt much cleaner to server-wide chat styles and translations. No more broken color tags or raw text bleeding into menu titles.

📂 Behind-the-Scenes & Cleanup

• Streamlined Storage: We packed up and moved your player data and menu layouts into a brand new, organized configs/ directory.
• Resource Cleanup: Stripped out ancient, leftover configuration files (colors.yml, patterns.yml layouts) and cleaned up unused language files to give the plugin a lighter disk footprint and faster boot times.

📊 Performance Monitoring & Analytics

• Dedicated Metrics Managers: Added BStatsManager and FastStatsManager to handle extended data tracking, giving you more robust, real-time insights into server performance and health.
• Framework Integration: Fully integrated the BStats and FastStats metrics frameworks for enhanced backend monitoring.

🌟 What's New?

• MiniMessage Tag Support: Added full support for modern MiniMessage formatting tags!
  • Note: Players will need the new chatcolor.minimessage permission node to use these tags in chat.
• Console Cleanup Feature: Added a new clean-console option in your config.yml. When enabled, it dynamically strips legacy color codes from logger outputs, keeping your server console crisp and readable.
• Smart Integration Detector: Added an IntegrationChecker that automatically scans for active DiscordSRV and LPC plugins on startup, printing helpful setup and configuration guidance straight to your console.

🛠️ Enhancements & Fixes

• Refactored Color Utilities: Built a much sturdier backend handler to bridge legacy color codes and modern MiniMessage components. Includes under-the-hood automatic conversion utilities (translateLegacyToMiniMessage) and stricter text safety checks.
• Streamlined PlaceholderAPI Integration: Completely reworked our placeholders for better stability and formatting logic.
  • Reorganized the placeholder structures for better clarity.
  • Added a dedicated %color_legacy% placeholder.
  • Improved stability when handling null or empty message inputs.
• Paper Server Optimization: Modified the ChatListener to bypass redundant last-message tracking on Paper-based servers, saving processing overhead.
• Compatibility Recommendation: Added a configuration comment recommending that server owners set their event-priority to HIGHEST for seamless operation alongside LPC or DiscordSRV.
• Stability Fix: Fixed a critical initialization bug caused by a missing structural brace in the main initialization logic, ensuring smooth reloads and clean server starts.

🎨 Group-Based Default Colors

Server admins can now define specific default chat colors based on player ranks or groups!

• Automatic Assignment: When joining or resetting your color, you'll start with the color assigned to your group.
• Priority Logic: If you belong to multiple groups, the system intelligently selects the highest priority color for you.

🖋️ Enhanced Chat Formatting (MiniMessage)

We’ve refined advanced formatting to keep the chat clean and secure:

• Smart Escaping: Players without MiniMessage permissions will no longer accidentally trigger formatting tags.
• Permission-Based Styling: High-tier formatting is now strictly tied to the chatcolor.minimessage permission.

🖥️ UI & Menu Upgrades

The Color Selection GUI has been refreshed for better navigation:

• Current Selection Highlighting: Your active color now glows and displays a "Selected" status in the menu.
• Improved Permissions: Accessing menus is smoother with updated default permission nodes.

🛠️ Internal Improvements

• Reliability: Added automated tests for consistent color and formatting application.
• Performance: Optimized configuration handling for faster in-game response times.

Version 2026.5.0

📦 Major UI Overhaul

We’ve completely stripped out the legacy GUI system and replaced it with FastInv. This transition makes all in-game menus snappier and significantly reduces the plugin's resource footprint.

• Performance Boost: Removed GUIManager and GUIListener in favor of a more streamlined event handling system.
• Menu Updates: MainMenu and ColorSelector have been fully migrated to the new framework.
• Native Compatibility: Switched to native Bukkit materials for menu items, ensuring better long-term stability.

🌈 Enhanced Formatting & MiniMessage

Advanced text styling is now easier than ever with full MiniMessage integration.

• MiniMessage Support: New serialization logic allows for modern gradients and hex styling.
• PAPI Expansion: Two new parameters added to PlaceholderAPI hooks:
  • message_mm
  • mm_
• Flexible Styling: Improved handling for complex message scenarios, giving you more control over how text looks in-game.

⚙️ Technical Refinement

• Core Update: The plugin now targets Minecraft API 1.21.
• Lightweight Build: Removed the XSeries dependency to keep the .jar size small and efficient.
• Documentation: Configuration and PlaceholderAPI guides on the website have been updated to cover these new features.

Note: This update includes internal refactoring. If you are a developer hooking into our previous GUI classes, please refer to the updated documentation regarding FastInv.

Changelog

🎨 Visuals & Color Handling

• Default Color Logic: The system now automatically applies default colors via ConfigManager to messages and display names if no custom color is selected.
• Color Engine Overhaul: Centralized all color tag application within ColorUtil for better consistency and performance.
• Legacy Cleanup: Replaced outdated serialization methods with a unified legacy serializer and added stripLegacy support to keep chat clean.
• Refined Patterns: Improved the PatternApplier to handle complex string formatting more efficiently.

⚙️ Performance & Stability

• Thread Safety: Migrated PlayerDataManager to use ConcurrentHashMap, ensuring player data remains stable and safe during multi-threaded operations.
• Message Optimization: Refactored the core message coloring logic to ensure faster processing and more consistent application.
• Advanced Placeholders: Enhanced MessageManager to support advanced placeholders, allowing for more dynamic server communication.

Changelog

• Fixes where non-legacy colors were ending with
• Updated Wiki

ChatColor Rework

• I redid the whole plugin to be more modern with current-day MC servers
• New GUI Layout
• More colors
• Wiki Website
  • Click here for website

If there are any issues, please report them. I can't fix anything if I don't know about it.

This major release brings support for Minecraft 1.21+, significant updates to the underlying architecture (Java 17), and full integration with ChatControl.

Important Notes

• 1.21+ Support: This version is fully updated for modern Minecraft versions (1.21+).
• Java 17 Required: We have upgraded to Java 17. Please ensure your server runtime is up to date.

Integrations & Features

• ChatControl Support: Added full integration with ChatControl.
  • Adjusted ChannelPostChatEvent priority to HIGHEST.
  • Refined message formatting with multi-step fallback logic.
• Shading: Configured proper dependency shading and exclusions.

Technical Improvements

• Precision: Changed rating from int to double in SpigotResource.
• Cleanup: Removed redundant comments and simplified formatting logic.
• Build: Reorganized repositories in pom.xml.

Dependencies & Ops

• PlaceholderAPI: Updated to 2.11.5.
• XSeries: Updated to 13.6.0.
• Authlib: Adjusted scope to provided.
• Documentation: Expanded README with commands, permissions, and config.
• License: Added LICENSE file.