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A major part of managing any modern Minecraft server is editing .yml configurations to perfectly match your server’s aesthetic. All Sentry Studios resources—as well as most modern plugins across the ecosystem—utilize standardized formatting parsers. This guide covers everything you need to know to prevent configuration errors and create stunning visual layouts.

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YAML Best Practices

Configurations are entirely written in YAML (.yml). YAML is extremely sensitive to formatting. A single misplaced character can prevent a plugin from loading entirely.

Use Spaces, Not Tabs

YAML strictly forbids the use of tabs for indentation. Always use the Spacebar (typically 2 spaces per indentation level).

Quote Your Strings

If your text contains special characters (like :, ', ", or &), wrap the entire message in quotes. Example: message: "&cError: Invalid!"
If your server console shows a “YAML Parsing Error,” run your configuration file through a YAML Validator to easily spot the missing space or unclosed quote.

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Colors & Gradients

Our plugins natively support modern color parsers. You aren’t limited to the standard 16 Minecraft legacy colors; you can utilize the entire RGB spectrum.
Standard Minecraft color codes are fully supported using the & symbol.

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Typography & Small Caps

A massive trend in modern server design is the use of custom typography to make graphical interfaces and chat messages feel “premium.” One of the most popular methods is utilizing Small Caps. Since Minecraft doesn’t have a native Small Caps font, this is achieved by replacing standard characters with specialized unicode characters (e.g., converting STORE into sᴛᴏʀᴇ).
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Using Small Caps

While some plugins have built-in tags for this, the most universally compatible method across all plugins is to generate the text using an online text converter and paste it directly into your .yml file.
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Clean UI Design

We highly recommend using Small Caps for GUI titles, item lore headers, and scoreboard titles to give your server a clean, modern aesthetic without clutter.
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Unicode Compatibility

Ensure your server software is configured to support UTF-8 encoding. If your small caps show up as weird question marks (?) in-game, you need to add -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 to your server startup script flags.

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Dynamic Placeholders

Whenever you want to display changing data—like a player’s balance, their latency, or their rank—you use a Placeholder. Almost all modern plugins, including ours, hook into PlaceholderAPI (PAPI).
  • Placeholders are always wrapped in % symbols (e.g., %player_name% or %vault_eco_balance%).
  • Before a placeholder will work, you must download its respective expansion. For example, to use a Sentry stat placeholder, you might run /papi ecloud download Sentry and then /papi reload.
  • Troubleshooting: If a placeholder shows up exactly as you typed it in-game (e.g., literally prints %player_name% in chat), it means the expansion is missing, not installed properly, or PAPI hasn’t been reloaded.
Last modified on July 28, 2026