Masquerade

Masquerade: Wear Someone Else's Face

Masquerade adds a craftable mask that turns you into another player — their name, their skin, their silhouette — for five minutes. Craft the mask, rename it in an anvil to the nickname of your victim, and put it on: everyone around you sees a different person. The mask is consumed when worn, and the disguise always ends on its own.

Your real identity never leaves the server. The tab list, your UUID, your permissions and your commands stay yours — only the face changes.

Why Your Server Needs This Plugin

• A real disguise, not just a name tag. The plugin swaps the actual player profile: the skin is copied too, so the impostor looks like the victim from across the arena, not just in the player list.
• Safe by design. The tab-list nickname, your UUID, your permissions and every command stay untouched. A disguised player cannot use the disguise to bypass bans, permissions or staff tools — they only borrow a face.
• Five minutes, not forever. Every disguise runs on a 5-minute timer with a countdown in the action bar (4, 3, 2, 1 minutes, 30 seconds, 10…1). No permanent impersonation.
• One command to clean up. /masquerade clear <player> removes a disguise instantly — the real face comes back in the same tick, even if the player is mid-fight.
• Admin-friendly. One command with tab-completion to hand out masks, a default-language option and a debug switch for troubleshooting.
• Localized. Every player sees texts in their own language (EN / RU by client locale) — chat, action bar, item name and lore. The crafting preview is localized too, so everyone sees the result in their own language.
• Performance-first. One shared timer for all active disguises, skin lookups off the main thread, zero dependencies, a 27 KB jar.

How It Works

• Craft the mask (recipe below) or hand it out with /masquerade give <player>.
• Put the mask in an anvil and rename it to the nickname of the player you want to disguise as (3–16 characters: letters, digits and underscore). Any other text is rejected by the anvil.
• Put the mask on your head. It is consumed immediately, and the disguise starts with "You put on <nick>'s mask. 5 min remaining."
• From this moment your name above your head and in chat belongs to the victim, and the skin is theirs as well.
• The action bar counts the disguise down (4, 3, 2, 1 min, 30 s, 10…1 s).
• When the timer runs out: a sound, a puff of smoke, and "The masquerade is destroyed." The real name and skin come back instantly.

The disguise also ends if you die, if you leave the server, or if an administrator clears it. Your identity is always restored — the game never shows the "formerly known as …" line.

The Mask

• Item: Masquerade Mask (leather helmet base, custom name and lore)
• Duration: 5 minutes (300 seconds)
• Copies: the displayed name in chat and above the head, and the skin
• Keeps: tab-list nickname, UUID, permissions, commands, real skin
• Ends on: timer, death, leaving the server, /masquerade clear

Crafting Recipe (shaped, 3×3 crafting table)

Masquerade Mask

Netherite Ingot / Echo Shard / Netherite Ingot

Echo Shard / Wither Skeleton Skull / Echo Shard

Netherite Ingot / Echo Shard / Netherite Ingot

A 2×2 grid in the inventory is not enough — a crafting table is required.

How to Obtain a Mask

• Crafting — the 3×3 recipe above; the crafting preview shows the mask in the crafter's own language
• Admin — /masquerade give <player>; the item name and lore are baked in the receiver's language

⌨️ Commands

• /masquerade give <player> — give a mask to a player (created in that player's language)
• /masquerade clear <player> — remove a player's disguise right now, restoring their real name and skin

Permission:
masquerade.admin (defaults to operators). Tab completion covers player names.

⚙️ Technical Advantages for Administrators

• Performance: one shared one-second timer drives every active disguise (no per-player tasks). Skin resolution — reading SkinsRestorer's files or querying the Mojang profile API — happens off the main thread; only the profile swap runs in the main thread. Nothing ticks in the background when no one is disguised.
• Safety: the item's identity lives in the PersistentDataContainer (PDC) — a renamed leather helmet can never trigger a disguise. The real profile is snapshotted once and restored strictly synchronously on exit, death or /masquerade clear, so the player data never stores a masked name.
• Localization: EN/RU per player (client locale), a default-language option for the console and the crafting template, and item names and lore baked in the receiver's language at the moment of creation.
• Compatibility: Paper 26.3 (Java 25), pure Paper API, no NMS, no external dependencies. SkinsRestorer is optional (softdepend) — the plugin works fine without it.

Two Setup Paths — Skins Work Everywhere

• Licensed server (online-mode=true): nothing to install. Skins are taken from the victim's live profile and from Mojang's API, so the disguise copies the real skin.
• Unlicensed / offline-mode server: install SkinsRestorer. Cracked accounts have no Mojang profile, so the plugin reads the victim's saved skin from SkinsRestorer's storage. Without it, disguises of players who are offline copy the name only, not the skin.

⚠️ Known Third-Party Issue (not a plugin bug)

If the server runs the spark profiler, its ping monitor may throw a single exception when a disguised player and their victim are online at the same time (spark builds an ImmutableMap keyed by profile name, and duplicate names are not allowed). This is an upstream spark bug — it happens with any plugin that changes a profile name — and it is harmless: the ping-monitor task simply stops, the server keeps running normally.

Installation

• Drop Masquerade-1.0.0.jar into your server's /plugins folder.
• Restart the server (plugin.yml has api-version: 26.3).
• On unlicensed / offline-mode servers install SkinsRestorer as well, so the skins of offline victims can be copied.
• Optionally edit plugins/Masquerade/config.yml (default-language / debug) — otherwise every player automatically gets their own client language.

Perfect For

• Roleplay and story servers that need a face for a scene — witnesses, impostors, undercover agents.
• Event and tournament servers: hand out masks as a rare reward and let the hunt begin.
• Horror and Halloween builds: the victim walks in, someone else walks out.
• Faction and gang servers: a masked member slips past the enemy camp.
• SMP servers that want a bit of mischief without a permanent identity swap.

Install Masquerade and let your players wear someone else's face!