FAQ

Can't find your answer here? Ask on Discord or see the Support page.

Why does /spark not work on my Paper server?

Paper ships with a profiler plugin that owns the bare /spark command, so on Paper that name goes to the profiler instead of AscendSMP. Use the /ability alias (or /ascendsmp:spark) and it does exactly the same thing. On Spigot there is no clash and /spark works normally.

How do I get a primary ability?

Craft the primary's ability item (the recipes are in recipes.yml and shown in the in-game codex), then hold it and right-click to bind it. If you already had a primary bound, the old one is handed back to you as an item. You can unbind from the ability menu with a two-click confirm to get the item back. See Crafting and Primaries.

How do I change my secondary?

Right-click an Ability Shard. It swaps your secondary for a different random one. The shard is craftable, and admins can hand one out with /ascend give shard. New players get a random secondary automatically on first join. See Secondaries.

How do I activate my abilities?

Tap the offhand-swap key (F by default) for your primary. Hold sneak and tap the same key for your secondary. If the key does not work for you, /ability primary and /ability secondary do the same thing.

My abilities stopped leveling from kills. Is that a bug?

No, that is the anti-farm rule. Kills on the same victim only count a limited number of times per time window, so you cannot level forever off one person. Totem of Undying pops do not count as kills either. Kill different players and leveling continues. The anti-farm rules are configurable in abilities.yml; see Balance.

The Ender dragon mount acts strange on my server. What do I do?

Ender's power summons a rideable Ender Dragon using only the public server API, and on some setups it can misbehave. Set dragon-enabled: false in the event block of abilities.yml and run /ascend reload to use the stable flight fallback instead. The plugin also switches to the fallback automatically if the dragon fails to spawn. See Event abilities.

Stealth made me invisible but my armor still shows. Why?

Stealth uses the vanilla invisibility effect, and normal Minecraft rules apply: armor and held items stay visible. This is a game limitation, not a bug.

The HUD shows plain ability names instead of icons. How do I get icons?

Icons are controlled by hud.icon-mode in config.yml. The default is TEXT, which needs nothing and shows ability names. VANILLA uses glyph icons from a resource pack you build (the plugin writes a starter font file on first run). ITEMSADDER takes icons from the ItemsAdder plugin and quietly falls back to TEXT if ItemsAdder is not installed or configured. Full setup is on the HUD page.

The ready-made icons you see in this wiki's screenshots are the paid SMP Ability Icons Pack (30 HUD glyphs, ItemsAdder). Need it for Nexo or another setup? Ask on Discord.

How do I change the language?

Set language in config.yml to english, french, german, or spanish, then run /ascend reload. English is the source language; missing keys in the other files are auto-filled and reported in the console. See Languages.

Does the plugin need a database?

No. It uses SQLite by default, which is a single file with zero setup. If you prefer MySQL, set storage.type: MYSQL in config.yml and fill in the storage.mysql section (host, port, database, credentials, and an optional table prefix so several plugins can share one database). See Storage.

Can I change cooldowns, damage, and other numbers?

Yes, all of them. Every balance number (cooldowns, damage, ranges, durations, level scaling, first-join odds) lives in abilities.yml; nothing is hard-coded. Edit the file and apply it live with /ascend reload. See Balance.

Do config updates wipe my settings?

No. When you update the plugin, new options are merged into your existing files without touching your values, and invalid values fall back to safe defaults instead of breaking startup.