Minecraft Servers can become quite hard to maintain and require a place to have a lot of information and instructions on how to play, this was previously made aware of by using things such as the signs or automated messages in the console, but a better alternative for this is a message fully modifiable in front of the thing in question, a message that can hold special information for each player and introduces them to the server, and that’s when Holographic Displays enter the scene.

So, what’s Holographic Displays?

Holographic Displays is a Minecraft plugin that will add the possibility to create holograms fully configurable to display information to the player, including text or photos! This plugin is fully compatible with placeholders, so you will be able to include in the messages variables such as the number of players from the server, or ranking information.

Holographic Displays is a really known plugin; chances are you may have seen this plugin in action before, in the spawn point of a server instructing how to access the modalities or giving some insight into the commands used.

There are a few limitations in the plugin due to the Minecraft behavior, such as not being able to modify the direction the messages are facing or changing the font size, but the benefits sure override the cons

Installation

  • Go to the official site
  • Download the version corresponding to your Minecraft server version

Once downloaded, you’ll need to upload the file to your server, this can be done by doing the following:

  • Access your game panel and stop your server
  • Go to the Files tab and click on the Plugins folder
    • If this folder doesn’t exist, you can create it
  • Locate the file previously downloaded on your computer, drag and drop it into this folder
  • Start your server

Start using Holographic Displays

Once Holographic Displays has been installed, you can start using it on your server. For example, you could set some Welcome message in your spawn for new users to see

Holographic Displays Example

In this guide, we’ll cover some of the basic commands and usage for Holographic Displays, so feel free to reach the official documentation for more information

Creating your first hologram with Holographic Displays

You can start creating holograms through the hd create command, this is the syntax:

/hd create <hologram name> <text>

For example, with /hd create Hologram1 Hello World we’re creating a new hologram with the name Hologram1, this new hologram will be placed in your current spot and will show ‘Hello World’ as the content

Holographic Displays - Create a Hologram

The name or id is also really important since you’ll use it to modify or delete this hologram in the future, so you can’t use the same name for two different holograms

Like the example at the start, you can use colors in your Holograms, just add the color codes wherever you like in the message. For example:

/hd create Hologram1 &6Hello &3World

Hologram colors
You can also use hex colors if you want: &#<hex code>

If you ever want to delete your hologram, you can use the hd delete command:

/hd delete <hologram name>

So by using /hd delete Hologram1 we’ll delete the Hologram previously created, which is useful if we want to assign that name to a different hologram

Delete a hologram
Use Placeholders in your holograms

HolographicDisplays is compatible with a bunch of placeholders, which are special variables that will display a value, such as the player’s name, the number of players online, or the status from a different server.

For example, if we want to address the player in a certain message, we can use {player}, which will get replaced by the player’s username in the server.

/hd create Hologram1 &6Hey {player}! Nice to see you!
Using placeholders in a hologram
In this case, ‘Iceline’ is the player’s username

How to edit a hologram

There are a few available commands to edit your created holograms. This list can be seen at any moment in the chat through the hd edit command

/hd edit <hologram name>
You can hover your cursor on each command to see a explanation, but here's a brief summary of what they do.

/hd info <hologram name> = Shows the number of lines and content from the Hologram
/hd addLine <hologram name> <text> = Will add a new line to the hologram specified
/hd removeLine <hologram name> <line number> = Will remove a specified line from the hologram
/hd setLine <hologram name> <line number> <new text> = Will change a line from the hologram with a new text
/hd insertLine <hologram name> <line number> <text> = Will insert a new line with text after the line specified

So if we want to add a new line to our Hologram1 we can use /hd addLine Hologram1 This is a new line

Adding new lines to a hologram

Alternatively, you can use the buttons in the chat such as [add], [remove]… to insert the command directly in the chat, which is useful and can help to save a lot of time

Move a hologram to another place

Holograms are placed by default at your feets, so if you want to move it use /fly or change your gamemode to creative and locate yourself in the position, then type the hd movehere command

/hd movehere <hologram name>
Moving a hologram - before
Before
Moving a hologram - after
After

Alternatively, let’s say you have two Holograms that you want to align, how would you do it? Simply, through the hd align command:

/hd align <X | Y | Z | XZ> <hologram to align> <hologram for reference>

This command takes an axis (not a number, either X, Y, Z or XZ) and will align the first hologram with the second (which will be used as reference).

So, by typing /hd align Y Hologram2 Hologram1 we are moving the Hologram 2 to the same Y axis as the Hologram1

Holographic Displays - Moving Hologram2 to Hologram1 Y axis - before
Holographic Displays - Moving Hologram2 to Hologram1 Y axis - after

How to display images in your holograms

One of the most useful features of Holographic Displays is that it can display images in a hologram. But before that, we’ll need to upload the image file we’re going to use

  • In your server files, go to the plugins folder
  • Locate the HolographicDisplays folder and access it
  • In your computer, locate the image file you want to upload
  • Drag and drop it on the HolographicDisplays folder
Holographic Displays root folder
For example, we’ve uploaded the Iceline.png file

Once the file has been uploaded, we can now proceed. Create a hologram that will work as the placeholder for the image, then type the following command:

/hd readimage <hologram name> <image name with extension> <width>

For example, /hd readimage image1 Iceline.png 120 will show the following

Iceline Hosting logo in Holographic Displays

Keep in mind that if the file is too big, it might not show properly. You can adjust the image width as you see fit, but it can result in an fps loss

Holographic Displays Configuration

Like other plugins, the configuration file for HolographicDisplays is called config.yml. Here you can change some of the aspects of the plugin, such as:

Change line spacing

You can change the amount of space between lines by changing the space-between-lines variable. Replace the default value 0.02 with any number of your choice

Change timezone

For some placeholders such as {time} you’ll need to change the plugin’s timezone so it matches yours. Just replace the GMT+1 value with your timezone in the zone variable

Display information from another server

Through the placeholders, you can display information from other servers inside your holograms, this is useful for bungee servers or lobbies.

Before that, you’ll need to add the server information to your config.yml

  • Locate the pinger variable
  • Change the enable value from false to true
  • Once enabled, locate the servers variable
  • Below any of the examples, add the server alias (which you’ll use with the placeholder inside the hologram) and the server IP. It should look like this
Syntax Example
We’ve used Hypixel as the example

Now you can go to your server and use placeholders such as {motd: server alias} to display information from that server

Holographic Displays - Showing information from another server
In the example above, the placeholders and text used in the hologram were:

{motd: hypixel}
{motd2: hypixel}
Status: {status: hypixel}
{online: hypixel} / {max_players: hypixel} players on the server

Permissions

By default, every user has access to the /hd command to see information such as the plugin’s version.

With a permissions plugin, you can give a certain group access to any command of the plugin with the holograms.<command> permission, for example, holograms.create

If you want to give them access to all the commands, use the holograms.* permission



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