The allowed add-ons and plug-ins list is posted

DriftwoodXI now has a posted Allowed Add-ons & Plug-ins list. You can read it on the Allowed tab in the launcher, next to Addons, or on the website at xi.driftwoodgaming.com/addons. The two are the same list.

Why post one at all

The convention across private servers is simple, and it cuts both ways. A server that has never posted a list has, in practice, allowed everything, because nobody can be held to a rule that was never written down. A server that posts one has said the opposite: what is named is permitted, and what is not named is not.

We are adopting the second. There are a small number of add-ons this server does not want running, and until today the only thing standing between them and the game was that we quietly left them out of the download. That is not a rule, it is a hope.

What it actually says

Three lines, and they are the whole thing.

• On the list means allowed. Any combination, any character, no permission needed.
• Not on the list means not allowed, and using it is against the terms of use here.
• Missing is not the same as refused. Nearly everything absent from the list is absent because nobody has ever asked about it. Ask and it gets read, and if it passes it goes on the list by name, for everyone.

Most of you have nothing to do

Everything the DriftwoodXI launcher installs for you is on the list, every last folder of it. That is deliberate. If you press Play and have never installed an add-on of your own, you are already inside the rules and you never have to think about this again.

The part worth reading is the part about what you add yourself. The launcher's Install from GitHub box makes that easy, which is exactly why the list needed to exist.

The four questions

Every entry was read rather than guessed at. The line is not whether an add-on touches the client, because half the list patches the client, including add-ons the launcher turns on for you by default. The line is these four questions, and an add-on has to answer no to all four:

1. Does it play the game while nobody is at the keyboard? 2. Does it reach content the character has not earned or travelled to? 3. Does it show what the game withholds, from a job or a player that should not see it? 4. Does it overrule what the server would otherwise have decided?

Anything that only changes how your own screen draws, sounds, waits or is laid out answers no to all four by definition, which is why so much of the list needed no argument at all. Being powerful is not one of the questions. Your squad is the most powerful thing on this server and it ships in the box.

Twelve are named

Twelve add-ons and tools are named on the list as not allowed: door openers, warp forgers, the ones that render what a GM has hidden, the ones that track a zone from a job that cannot track, and the bots that play while you are not there. None of them reach your computer through the launcher; they were taken out of the client bundle before launch. They are named anyway, so the ruling is on the record instead of being found out the hard way.

Inside the launcher

The Addons tab now marks anything it recognises. Something named as not allowed says so on its row, and something the list has never ruled on says Ask first, which is a question and not an accusation. Most add-ons you install from GitHub will say that, and asking is how they stop saying it.

Send a question in from inside the game with /dwreport, or ask in Discord. A link to where it came from and a line about what it does for you is all it takes. Anything that only redraws your own screen is nearly always a yes, and the answer gets published either way.