Tips

Menu author

Small things that save time. Updated as more emerge.

Auto-reload while editing

/am reload rebuilds every menu from disk, but typing it after every edit gets old fast. Run /am serve once and the plugin watches the menus folder. Every save reloads the changed file. Toggle off by running /am serve again.

Caution

Author-time only. Don’t leave the file watcher running on a production server — it’s an extra IO listener for no benefit once menus stop changing.

Hot-load addons

Drop a new addon.conf-bearing jar into plugins/AbstractMenus/addons/, then run:

/am addons rescan

The plugin picks up the new jar without a server restart. Use /am addons reload <name> to refresh an already-loaded addon after replacing its jar.

Plugin-as-addons need a regular /reload or server restart — Bukkit owns their lifecycle.

MiniMessage when you need it

If you want <click:run_command:...>, <hover:show_text:...>, gradients, or rainbow text, flip useMiniMessage: true in config.conf. It’s off by default to skip the parser pass on every render — turning it on costs a single-digit-percent hit on per-frame menu updates.

Variables CLI

For the same data your menus read with %var_*% and %varp_*%:

/var set kit_cooldown 1700000000000     # epoch ms
/varp set Notch coins 500
/varp inc Notch coins 25

inc, dec, mul, div work for numeric values. They’re cheap; running them from a console-only /say activator is a clean way to apply rate-limited side-effects.