SoundSight
AvailableA creeper’s fuse is 1.5 seconds of pure audio with no visual tell until the flash. An arrow leaving a bow behind you makes no mark on the screen at all. A player who cannot hear those is playing a materially harder game than everyone else on the server, and no setting in the Minecraft client changes it — so SoundSight puts them where they can be seen.
- Accessibility
- Gameplay & Progression
- accessibility
- deaf
- hard of hearing
- bedrock
- hud
What it does
The creeper you cannot hear
The fuse is the most audio-dependent death in Minecraft: 1.5 seconds of sound with no visual tell until the flash. SoundSight gives it the only full-screen title in the plugin — direction and distance, nothing else to read — and it fires before a creeper is already on top of you. If a server enables only one of these, this is the one.
A sense of what is around you
Hearing gives you a continuous, effortless read on what is nearby and roughly where. The threat radar is that, as a boss bar: the hostile mobs near you, nearest first, each with a direction and a distance in blocks. It sits in its own channel rather than the action bar, which on a real server is already shared by three other plugins.
Direction, not just alarm
Every cue says which way. Something hit you is a jump scare; Skeleton, behind you is something you can act on. Eight compass buckets relative to the way you are facing — and the cue for a mob targeting you stays deliberately silent when it is already in front of you, because a warning about things you can see is one people switch off, and switching it off costs them the times it mattered.
It never becomes an advantage
Invisible mobs are never reported. Neutral mobs are not reported until they actually target you, so the End and the Nether do not turn into a wall of noise. Nothing is seen through walls that a sound would not have carried through. The moment a plugin like this hands out an edge it stops being accessibility and becomes a thing servers ban rather than install.
On by default, because it has to be
soundsight.use defaults to everyone. A player who needs this cannot ask an operator for a permission they do not know exists, and an accessibility feature that has to be discovered reaches almost nobody. New players get one message on their first join saying it exists and how to turn it off — once, ever. Both are a single line to change.
Built for Bedrock too
A large share of the players this is written for are on Bedrock, where the chat box covers the screen and a menu is a modal. With Floodgate the settings screen is a native form; without it everyone gets a chest menu built to Bedrock’s constraints anyway — plain left-click only, nothing important hidden in hover text. And every setting has a one-line text form, so the menu is never the only way in.
Compatibility
- Cues
- Creeper, damage direction, targeted from behind, fishing bite, threat radar, tool warning, name mentions
- Channels
- Boss bar, action bar and title — arbitrated so cues never overwrite each other
- Storage
- players.yml. No database, no driver download
- Dependencies
- None. Floodgate optional, for native Bedrock forms
- Events
- Read-only — nothing is ever cancelled or modified
Commands
Permissions default to true for player commands and op for admin ones.
| Command | What it does | Permission |
|---|---|---|
/soundsight | The settings screen — a native form on Bedrock, a chest menu otherwise. | soundsight.use |
/soundsight test | Show every cue you have on, once. Nothing in it is real. | soundsight.use |
/soundsight (cue) [on|off] | Turn one cue on or off in a single line, without opening anything. | soundsight.use |
/soundsight on · /soundsight off | The master switch. Per-cue choices are kept for when you turn it back on. | soundsight.use |
/soundsight list | Every cue, whether you have it, and what it does — as text. | soundsight.use |
/soundsight status | What the server is running with, and whether the boss-bar channel is healthy. | soundsight.admin |
Before you buy
Can it show every sound in the game?
No, and it is worth being straight about why. SoundSight runs on the server and reconstructs cues from game state — there is no way for any plugin to intercept what your client actually plays. So it covers the sounds that carry decision-critical information rather than all of them: ambient cave noise, footsteps and music are not represented. The cues that are here were chosen because losing them changes whether you live.
Does this give players an unfair advantage?
It is built specifically not to. Invisible mobs are never reported at all. Endermen and zombified piglins are not reported until they actually target you. Nothing is reported further away than a sound would have carried, and the radius is capped at 48 blocks whatever you put in the config. A hearing player with headphones already knows everything SoundSight shows.
Will it fight with my other plugins?
It cannot. Every handler is MONITOR priority and read-only — SoundSight never cancels or modifies an event, it only describes what already happened. The threat radar deliberately uses the boss bar rather than the action bar for the same reason: the action bar is the one piece of screen every other plugin also wants.
What does it cost on a busy server?
Almost nothing, because the work only happens for players who asked for it. Every event handler opens with the cheap test — server switch, then world, then the player’s own setting — so the vast majority of calls return immediately. The only scan runs for players who actually turned the radar on, four times a second, over a bounded radius.
Do I need Floodgate?
No. With it, Bedrock players get a native form for the settings screen. Without it everyone gets a chest menu, and that is a supported configuration rather than a degraded one — the menu is built to Bedrock’s constraints either way, and every setting also has a plain text command.
What happens to a player’s settings if I roll back a version?
They survive. Cue names an older jar does not recognise are kept and written back untouched rather than dropped. Without that, one session on an older version would silently erase what your players had chosen, and nobody would ever connect the two events.