Welcome and goals

What a new player sees: the welcome screen, the bossbar goal, the trail, and how to skip.

Who counts as new

A player is new when FirstHour has no record of them and they are not an existing veteran. On their first join FirstHour:

1. Gives them a path. On PRO with several paths, that’s the first path in paths.yml they have permission for.
2. Shows the welcome screen after welcome.delay-ticks (40 ticks, 2 seconds).
3. Puts their first goal on the bossbar.
4. On PRO, pings veterans so someone can say hi. See Veterans say hi.

When you add FirstHour to a running server, players with 30 or more minutes of playtime count as veterans. They get no path and stay out of your new-player stats. See new-players.

The welcome screen

The screen has a title, a short line of text and one Start button.

Paper 26.1

A native dialog. Players press Start or close it with Escape. The button works once, for 30 minutes.

Paper 1.21.4

A title and subtitle, then a chat welcome with a clickable [Start] line. Clicking it runs /firsthour start.

FirstHour uses the native dialog whenever the server has Paper’s Dialog API. If the dialog ever fails to open, it logs a warning and falls back to the chat welcome.

Edit the text under welcome: in messages.yml. Set welcome.enabled: false in config.yml to skip the screen. New players still get their path and the bossbar.

The path is live from the first join. Pressing Start shows the first goal with a title and a sound, but players make progress whether they press it or not.

Start

Start shows a Goal 1 title with the goal as its subtitle, plays the goal-start sound, and sends the goal and its hint in chat:

Goal 1/6: Walk to the spawn shops · Follow the sparkles. Everything you sell starts here.

The bossbar

While a player has goals left, the bossbar shows:

• the goal number and total, for example Goal 1/6
• the goal’s title
• a live counter for goals that need more than one action
• the time to the next timed reward

The bar fills as the goal progresses. Counters look like this:

Goal	Counter
Count goals (break, craft, kill…) with amount above 1	(3/8)
earn	($120/$1000)
playtime	(4/10 min)
One-off goals	none

After the path is done, the bar shows Next reward in 27:04 until every timed reward is paid, then hides. Set colour and style with bossbar.color and bossbar.style, or turn it off with bossbar.enabled: false.

Trail and compass

go_to goals point the way. Every 2 seconds by default, FirstHour draws a short line of particles from the player toward the target. Only that player sees it. When the goal is announced, their compass points at the target too.

The trail only draws when the player is in the target’s world. Change the particle, colour, size, timing and length under trail: in config.yml.

Finishing goals

When a goal is done, the player gets a check line with the reward, and the step-done sound:

✔ Walk to the spawn shops · you got $50

Then the next goal appears in chat. If the player already did the next goal and it has skip-if-done: true, it ticks off straight away. That can chain through several goals at once.

When the last goal is done, the player sees an All set! title, hears path-complete, and gets a line about tomorrow’s reward. See Come-back days.

Coming back mid-path

A player who logs off halfway picks up where they stopped:

Welcome back! Goal 3/6: Make your first sale (/firsthour)

Players can type /firsthour any time to see their current goal, its hint, and the time to the next timed reward.

Skipping

Players with firsthour.skip (everyone, by default) can run /firsthour skip. That ends their goals and the bossbar.

Skipping also stops that player’s timed rewards and come-back rewards. Remove firsthour.skip from players if you don’t want them to opt out. A skipped player still counts as a new player in your stats, but leaves the step funnel.

To put a player back on the path, run /firsthour reset <player>. That wipes their FirstHour data, and online players start over as brand-new players.