Installing the engine

Tea is distributed as a single plugin jar: TeaCore. Lobby features (connection signs, /play, lobby spawn / gamemode management) ship inside that same jar and are turned on per server with a config toggle.

Which plugins go where

Server role	Plugins to install	TeaCore config	Why
Lobby / hub	TeaCore	lobby.enabled: true	/play, /leave, connection signs, lobby-side matchmaker
Game server (arena)	TeaCore + your game's jar	lobby.enabled: false	Runs matches; games declare depend: [TeaCore]
Single-server deployment	TeaCore + your game's jar	lobby.enabled: true	One JVM hosts both lobby and arenas

Any game plugin built on Tea declares depend: [TeaCore]. Game plugins may add their own hard dependencies - check the installation page for each game.

WorldEdit or FastAsyncWorldEdit is a soft-dependency of TeaCore. It's only required for map authoring (/tea map create, /tea map edit) and for pasting schematics at arena allocation time. Nothing else needs it.

First boot

1. Drop the TeaCore jar into plugins/ on each server, plus any game jars you want to run there.

2. Start the server once. TeaCore extracts its defaults:

   • plugins/TeaCore/config.yml
   • plugins/TeaCore/theme.yml
   • plugins/TeaCore/lang/en_US.yml
   • Each game's own config and lang files

3. Stop the server. Edit plugins/TeaCore/config.yml as needed (see Network mode and Theme). On any server that should host the lobby UI, set:

   lobby:
     enabled: true

   Leave it false (the default) on arena-only servers. Then start the server again.

Upgrading

Replace the jar and restart. On enable, TeaCore (and each game plugin) merges newly-added translation keys and config defaults from its jar into your on-disk files, so your customizations survive upgrades and any new keys still work.

If you ever end up with a corrupt or partially-edited language file, delete plugins/<PluginName>/lang/*.yml and restart - the bundles will be re-extracted.

Proxy setup (BungeeCord or Velocity)

Tea uses the legacy BungeeCord plugin-message channel for cross-server connects - both BungeeCord and Velocity honor this channel. You do not need a proxy-side plugin.

BungeeCord

In config.yml:

ip_forward: true

Velocity

In velocity.toml, make sure the channel isn't disabled (it's enabled by default) and forwarding mode is either legacy (simplest, matches the server's spigot.yml bungeecord: true) or modern with a shared secret:

player-info-forwarding-mode = "legacy"

[advanced]
bungee-plugin-message-channel = true

Game servers

On each server's spigot.yml:

settings:
  bungeecord: true