Features

Features

Applies to Player Activity View 0.0.0-beta.4 for Minecraft 1.21.1 (NeoForge), and to the stable 26.x lines.

Player Activity View adds no content of its own. Everything it does is visual feedback about other players, drawn on their model or your screen.

Typing indicators

When a player types — in chat, in a book, or on a sign — animated particles appear above their head, and an on-screen "is typing" message names them.

Two details worth knowing:

• Typing speed is measured and sent, not just the fact of typing. The indicator can convey how fast someone is typing.
• When several players are typing at once, the message switches to a configurable "several people are typing" string after a configurable character limit. Default limit: 50 characters, so it only triggers on genuinely long names.

Both the text strings and the position of the indicator are configurable client-side.

GUI visualizer

The centrepiece. When a player opens an interface, nearby players see which interface it is.

The mod recognises 20 distinct states:

NONE	CHEST	HORSE
CHAT_SCREEN	ENCHANTING_TABLE	LOOM
INVENTORY	ANVIL	VILLAGER
CRAFTING	BEACON	COMMAND_BLOCK
ESCAPE	BREWING_STAND	MISC
EDIT_SIGN	DISPENSER
EDIT_BOOK	FURNACE
	GRINDSTONE
	HOPPER

Chat typing is tracked separately from chat being open, so a player with the chat window focused but not typing is distinguishable from one actively typing.

Live screen mirror

Beyond naming the interface, the mod can render an actual image of it.

The open menu is captured, cropped to a circle, and shown as a small tilted panel held in front of the player. Anyone within range sees roughly what the player sees.

This is the most distinctive feature and the most demanding one — see Privacy before enabling it broadly.

Behaviour worth knowing:

• Circle crop by default. The panel shows a circular cut-out of the screen, not the whole rectangle, which keeps it readable at small size. The server can switch to showing the entire screen instead.
• The background is not rendered by default. This costs nothing visually in-world and saves a lot of bandwidth.
• Blur is applied by default at level 1 of 3, to stop aliasing artefacts on the crop edge.
• Only the initial image is sent by default. After a player opens a menu, one snapshot goes out and it is not updated as they move items around. This is the single biggest reason the mirror does not visibly update — and it is deliberate, for bandwidth.
• Range is limited. Default 10 blocks.

The send rate, the size, the blur and the crop are all server-configurable.

Idle detection

A player who has not moved for the configured number of ticks is marked idle. Default 6000 ticks — 5 minutes.

Idle state is shown two ways, each toggleable separately:

• an icon above their head, visible in-world;
• an indicator in the tab player list.

It can also announce idle changes in chat, which is off by default. Turning that on makes every idle transition a chat message, which on a busy server is a lot of noise — hence the default.

Inventory transfer animations

When items move between a player and a container, animated item particles fly between them. It makes chest and furnace loading visible at a glance instead of instantaneous.

Arm animations

Players using an interface get arm movement — pointing, clicking, typing — so a third-person view of someone at a crafting table shows them working rather than standing frozen. This is what makes the mod feel alive rather than mechanical.

Sounds

Two subtle audio cues, both on by default: a soft sound when a player opens an interface, and a quieter one when they click inside one. Both are configurable, because in-world sounds triggered by other people get old fast.

Privacy controls

Every feature above can be switched off, on the client, by the server, or both. The details and the defaults are on Privacy, which is worth reading before installing this on a server with players who did not ask for it.