About
MatrixPearls is an Ender Pearl reliability system for Minecraft servers, built by Djorr and me. Ender pearls sit where the Minecraft version, the server software, the map and every other plugin meet, so they break in ways nobody can reproduce on demand: a player pearls through a corner seam, onto a wall or through glass, and staff have nothing to look at. MatrixPearls is a plugin that makes pearls land where they should, plus a hosted panel that records every throw, so that when something does go wrong nobody has to guess what happened.
How the plugin decides
The plugin simulates a pearl’s flight in sub-steps instead of leaving it to vanilla, so the landing is decided before vanilla would have resolved the hit. A set of behaviours each recognise one kind of situation, such as a throw down a one-block tunnel, a pearl against a wall or the seam where two builds meet, and propose a landing.
One guard then has the last word over all of them. It only ever refuses: it checks that the player fits, that the spot is reachable from where the pearl struck and not on the far side of a surface, and that nobody ends up on top of the block they stopped against. Because the guard sits above every behaviour, a rule added there holds for every behaviour and every Minecraft version at once.
One jar, Minecraft 1.7.10 to 26.2
Twenty Minecraft versions have an adapter of their own, each compiled against that version’s real server jar. Newer versions need no adapter at all: the pearl can fly on the Bukkit API alone, so a version nobody has built for still works instead of refusing to start. It runs on Spigot, Paper, Bukkit and Folia. On Folia every region has its own thread, so every scheduler call goes through a platform layer.
The panel
The plugin dials out to the panel over one outgoing connection, so there are no ports to open. Every throw is kept as a replayable 3D scene with the world as it was at that moment, and the decision trail retells the throw in six chapters of plain English, with every fit check and every ray the plugin cast. Clicking a chapter rewinds the replay to that moment.
Players can flag their own throws in game. An owner can mark a recorded throw as “never again”, after which the scenario is recognised by the shape of its blocks, anywhere on the map.
How it came to be
Djorr and I worked out the idea together. I wrote the fundamentals the plugin still stands on, and we both spent years building the rest. The project lay still for almost exactly a year, from August 2025 to August 2026, and nearly everything it is now was built after we picked it back up. Since July 2020, 38 pearl scenarios have been closed, each written up publicly with what broke, why, and what changed.
Try it
Soon you can start a MatrixPearls server of your own from this page: a private Minecraft server with the plugin installed, connected to the same panel paying customers use, and gone again after half an hour. It will run on Locus, the platform I built for my homelab.