Server rules · PetalMC Wiki

PetalMC keeps rules to a minimum, and every rule here is written to be checkable: you should always be able to tell, before you act, which side of the line you are on. If a situation isn’t covered by a rule below, it is allowed.

Chat is the one place that needs more than that. PetalMC has young players on it and is meant to be a comfortable place to be, so chat is moderated automatically and the conduct rules below apply to everything you say - global chat, private messages, signs, books and renamed items alike.

Use /sentinel in-game to learn about PetalMC’s server-side Sentinel Anti-Cheat Engine, and /sentinel status to see your rolling seven-day standing. Details for the curious: Sentinel anti-cheat.

How enforcement works here

Every consequence on PetalMC falls into exactly one of three categories. Knowing which category applies tells you what can actually happen to you:

Category	What it means	Can it punish you?
Forbidden	Breaking it creates a Sentinel violation, a chat infraction, or a staff decision	Yes - kicks, standing loss, chat restrictions, and in the worst cases a ban
Throttled	The server cuts the payoff automatically; doing it is not a violation	No - your yield or payout shrinks, nothing else
Fine	Normal play	No

Only the forbidden rules can ever get you kicked, restricted or banned. Throttled activity never becomes a violation on its own, no matter how often the throttle bites.

Definitions

These words mean exactly this, everywhere in the rules:

Cheat client / client advantage: any client, mod, resource pack, macro or external program that lets you act faster, see more, or reach further than an unmodified vanilla client operated by hand. Performance mods (Sodium-likes), minimaps without ore or entity radar, and cosmetic packs are not client advantages.
Mob farm: any mechanism that exploits Minecraft’s spawn mechanics to substantially reduce the effort required to acquire monster drops. Dark rooms, drowning chambers, fall towers, portal gold farms and raid farms are all mob farms.
Automated farm: any mechanism that uses automation blocks - Crafter, Hopper, Dropper, Dispenser, Observer, Pistons and Sticky Pistons - to harvest, or to reduce the input required from a player to acquire items.
AFK: no meaningful activity - moving several blocks, breaking, placing, fighting, or using an inventory - for 12 minutes or more. Looking around or bobbing in water does not count as activity.
Exploit: using a bug, unintended mechanic, or unintended interaction of server features to gain gold, items, XP or access you were not meant to have.

Forbidden

1. No cheat clients or client advantages

If a client or tool gives you a mechanical advantage, it is forbidden. This includes, without needing to be listed one by one: movement or flight hacks, kill aura and multi-aura, reach extension, fast-break/nuker, autoclickers and click macros, X-ray and ore/entity radar, and freecam used to scout through blocks. In the Abyss specifically, full-bright and gamma modification are also forbidden - darkness there is content, not an inconvenience. Scripted or macroed abuse of mob pathfinding is treated the same as a client advantage.

Sentinel checks these server-side (break timing, reach, hits through walls, multi-target windows, movement envelope, machine-like click cadence). One anomalous event is never a violation: impossible actions are cancelled, and only a repeat within the evidence window produces a kick and a recorded violation. Checks suspend automatically when the server itself is lagging.

2. No exploits, no duping

Exploiting bugs for gold, items or XP is forbidden. Item duplication in any form is forbidden. Abusing spawn-region mechanics (its safety, healing or protections) for economic gain is forbidden. If you find a bug that prints money or items, the rule is simple: report it, don’t farm it. Reporting earns goodwill; farming it is the one reliable way to turn a bug into a punishment.

3. No circumventing Sentinel or staff decisions

Sentinel throttling your build is expected behaviour, not an accusation. Deliberately working around that throttling is the offence.

This covers alternate accounts to dodge Red standing, rebuilding something staff asked you to remove, engineering around a throttle, and building large numbers of farms specifically to spread load and evade the throttling mechanics. The size of a build is not what matters here. Whether you set out to defeat the system is.

It is the only gameplay offence on PetalMC that carries a permanent ban - serious breaches of rule 4 can carry one too. Either way the ban is a staff decision made after reviewing evidence, never an automatic one.

4. No harassment, hate or cruelty

Aimed at a real person, all of this is forbidden anywhere on the server:

Slurs and hate speech, including anything targeting someone’s race, religion, nationality, disability, gender or sexuality. Campaigning against LGBT people is hate, not an opinion, and is treated as hate.
Harassment: repeated unwanted contact, following someone to bother them, pile-ons, or carrying a grudge here from somewhere else.
Sexual content, and any sexual approach to another player.
Threats against a real person, encouraging self-harm, or posting somebody else’s personal information.

“It was a joke” is not a defence, and edgy humour is not tolerated. Irony, sarcasm, quoting someone else, misspelling it, censoring a letter or saying it in another language does not move the line. If a reasonable person reading the log would find it hateful or cruel, it is.

This rule is about real people. Ordinary in-game aggression is not harassment and never has been - “I’m going to kill you and take your diamonds” is normal Minecraft, and the filter is built to let it through.

5. No working around another player’s chat safety

Everyone picks a chat safety level with /safety. A player on high receives chat, messages, party invites, gold and pocket visits only from people on their trust list (/trust, /untrust). Clan chat is exempt: joining a clan is the association.

The wall is deliberately quiet. You are not told when someone has one up, because that would be a public mark against them. If someone never answers you, treat that as the answer.

Getting around it is the offence: alternate accounts, asking a third player to pass messages along, writing at them on signs, in books, in renamed items or in a nickname, or trailing them around the world to get their attention.

Throttled (allowed, but the server cuts the payoff)

This is where farms live. Building them is not a rule you can break. None of the following is a violation, and you will never be kicked, marked or banned for any of it. The server simply refuses to let it pay:

Mob farms. Allowed, and throttled hardest, because they are by far the most expensive thing you can ask a server to run. Sentinel reduces the spawn fraction in a flagged chunk for a while and records it for review.
Automated crop / cane / cactus machines and machine-harvested generators: detected per-chunk; yield in a flagged area is crushed toward a few percent, and repeat offenders get growth and pistons randomly cancelled.
AFK and note-block fishing: sustained catches in one spot flag the area and catches (fish, junk, treasure and XP together) are voided with increasing probability. Casual shore fishing rarely trips this; if it does and it was clearly hand play, ask a member of staff.
Sitting AFK next to a flagged farm multiplies the crush further (×0.25 after 12 idle minutes, ×0.05 after 30).
Bulk selling: vendors and the Appraiser saturate per material, per player and server-wide, each calendar day. Heavy dumping walks the payout down toward a floor. The sell lore always shows the real price before you confirm, and a warning tells you when saturation has bitten.

Animal breeding and stock pens are watched by the same guard when they look like machines, and they fall here too.

Being throttled is not an accusation

Sentinel is not there to punish anyone for enjoying automation, which is a normal part of vanilla Minecraft. It is there to keep one build from ruining the experience for everybody else, and when it steps in on a heavy setup that is the system working, not you being caught.

The reason is architectural rather than moral. Minecraft simulates the world on a single thread with a 50 ms budget per tick, mob pathfinding is the most expensive thing in that budget, and mob farms exist specifically to keep mobs pathfinding. A farm in one region can slow the server for players who have never been near it, including players in another world. One AFK player at a large gold farm has been enough to take a server from 20 TPS to 9.

The full explanation, and what already protects the server, is on Farms & automation. It is worth ten minutes if you like building machines.

Fine

Normal combat, defending your base, lighting fights at night, killing hordes with a sword like nature intended. Hand-farming a crop plot of any size. Casual fishing. Selling a day’s spoils to vendors. Big storage rooms, sorting systems and item elevators that move items you gathered yourself. Building machines. Performance mods and cosmetics.

Two mechanics worth knowing

Neither of these is a rule. They are just how the server behaves, and they save people a wasted afternoon:

Monster spawners do not work. Spawner blocks cannot be placed, and naturally generated spawners never produce mobs. Breaking one open for the loot around it is fine.
Spawn eggs are disabled for regular players.

Mobs from spawners and eggs also pay nothing: no gold, no drop tables.

Chat, and how it is moderated

Every message is checked before it is delivered, global and private alike. There are three outcomes:

Outcome	What you see
Sent	Nothing at all. The overwhelming majority of messages.
Check first	A notice asking you to confirm before it sends, used where a message looks like it contains personal details about you, or real-world politics.
Blocked	It does not send, and it is recorded.

Two things worth knowing:

Blocked messages count. Three inside a rolling seven days moves your status to Limited, which narrows what you can do until a clean week restores it. Staff can see the messages behind any demotion, so a demotion is always reviewable.
Your own details are your business, up to a point. Your country, your city and your age are fine. A street address, school, workplace, full date of birth, phone number or email draws the check-first notice. Somebody else’s details are never yours to post at all.

Your chat status and your Sentinel standing are separate ladders: one is about what you say, the other about how you play. Neither affects the other.

Reporting someone

/report <player> <reason> sends it to staff with the surrounding context. The player you report is never told who reported them, and reports are read by people rather than by the filter - so say what actually happened.

Filing false reports to harass somebody is itself a breach of rule 4.

Standing, evidence and appeals

Every enforced detection records a tamper-evident evidence snapshot (terrain, containers, your inventory, and the preceding 30 seconds of activity - never chat) before anything else happens.
Your rolling seven-day standing: Green - no recorded kick; Yellow - one to four; Red - five or more.
Red standing restricts you: no sending or receiving direct gold transfers, no issuing or accepting party invitations, and other players see a ✖ beside your chat name. You are told this, with your current count, every login.
Standing recovers by itself: kicks age out of the seven-day window.
If you believe a detection was wrong, contact an administrator. Staff can walk through the actual evidence snapshot in-world and clear your history with one command. False positives cost us a glance; disputing one costs you nothing.
The same goes for chat. The filter is a tool, not a judge, and it does get things wrong. If a message was blocked and you think it shouldn’t have been, say so - a person will look at it.

The rest

Spawn and other protected regions are look-don’t-touch.
PvP without consent isn’t possible, so it isn’t a rule - it’s physics. See PvP.

Be kind, build cool things. 🌸