Introduction

Ecstacy is an anticheat for Minecraft servers built around Crystal PvP. It ships as a single plugin jar and does its scoring off the main thread, so heavy analysis never turns into TPS loss during a fight.

What it detects

Detection is grouped into four configurable families, each with its own section in checks.yml:

Family	Key	What it covers
Crystal Aura	`crystalaura`	Automated end-crystal placement and detonation
Anchor Macro	`anchormacro`	Respawn-anchor charge/detonate macros
Auto Totem	`autototem`	Automated totem swaps into the off-hand

All three are detections: they record violations, alert staff and can punish.

How the plugin and the cloud split the work

The plugin runs on your server and handles everything that must be immediate: packet capture, alerts, GUIs, punishments, mitigation, local violation storage. Scoring happens in the Ecstacy cloud, which the plugin connects out to over TCP. Nothing inbound has to be opened.

Practically, that means two things for you as an operator:

The plugin's per-tick cost stays flat as detection improves, because improvements land cloud-side and are not new work on your main thread. Measured numbers are on the benchmarks page.
Detections keep improving without a plugin update, but the server does need to reach the cloud. If the link drops, alerts and punishments stop until it comes back; see Troubleshooting.

What you need

Paper, Purpur, Pufferfish, Folia or Spigot on a version Ecstacy supports
PacketEvents, a hard dependency
Outbound TCP to cloud.ecstacy.ac:5001
A licensed jar from the Client Area. Your license identity is baked into the download, so there is no license key to paste anywhere

The current version and platform matrix is on the compatibility page, which is generated from what is actually supported rather than restated here.

How this differs from a rule-based anticheat

A conventional anticheat asks whether a player did something a rule forbids: moved further than the rule allows, clicked faster than the rule allows, reached further than the rule allows. That works, and it is why Ecstacy is designed to sit alongside a movement anticheat rather than replace one. See the compatibility page.

What rules struggle with is combat automation. A crystal module does not do anything a human physically could not do once; it does it consistently, for an hour, under conditions where a human would vary. Ecstacy scores that consistency instead of checking a limit, which is why the detections cover private and custom clients that no rule was ever written for.

Two consequences worth knowing before you tune anything:

A single flag is not a verdict. Every family accumulates a violation level and acts at fail.max, twenty by default. That distance is deliberate.
Detections change without you updating the plugin. Scoring is cloud-side, so improvements arrive without a jar swap. And without adding work to your main thread.

Vocabulary

These five words appear on every other page.

Term	Means
Flag	One recorded observation that cleared a check's evidence bar
VL	Violation level. The running count of flags, per player and per check. Reaching `fail.max` runs the `punish` block
Precision	How much evidence a check needs before it records a flag. `STRICT`, `FINE` or `STANDARD`. It does not change what the check looks at
Mitigation	Cancelling the offending packet instead of only recording it. Off by default on every family
Reputation	A player's standing across every server on the network, carried with them. It informs decisions; it never bans on its own

What it will not do for you

Being clear about this up front saves a support ticket:

It does not detect movement cheats. Fly, speed, reach. Run a movement anticheat next to it.
It does not ban anyone until you put a command in punish.commands. On Auto Totem that list ships empty, so that family reports and never acts until you say otherwise.
It does not work while the cloud link is down. Alerts and punishments stop and resume when it returns; /ecstacy doctor tells you which side is at fault.
It does not exempt your staff. Operators are scored like everyone else, on purpose.

Where to go next

Installation walks through the first restart. If Ecstacy is already running, Commands and Checks overview are the two pages worth reading before you change any configuration.