Playing an EternalTD Match

This page covers what a player actually sees and does inside a level instance: the on-screen displays, the placement aid, and the rules that quietly end a run. Tower stats live in Towers; enemy scaling lives in Waves & Enemies.

Getting In and Out

Action	Command
Join a level	/etd join <level>, or right-click a level NPC and pick a map from its menu
Start the first wave	/etd start (alias /etd go)
Skip the build timer	Right-click with the Next Wave tool
Leave the run	/etd quit (alias /etd stop)
Leave and return to the hub	/etd hub (alias /etd lobby)

You cannot join a second level while you are already in one, and a second /etd join while your world is still being copied is refused rather than queued.

On-Screen Displays

Scoreboard

A sidebar scoreboard headed [Eternal TD] is shown for the whole run and refreshed whenever anything on it changes:

• Wave — the current wave number
• Lives — starts at 20
• Gold — starts at 150
• Kills — total enemies you have killed this run
• Current wave attribute — the wave's elemental attunement (fire, air, water or earth), shown only once a wave is actually running

Your own scoreboard is captured on entry and handed back when the run ends, so a scoreboard from another plugin survives the round trip.

Wave progress bar

While a wave is running, a red boss bar reads Wave N! | remaining/total, plus the wave's modifier list when it has one (Fast, Horde, Air, Boss, Treasure, Resistant). The bar drains as enemies die.

Boss enemies get their own separate red bar titled Boss! tracking that single mob's health.

Action bar prices

Holding a tower item shows its current price next to your gold; holding the Upgrade tool and looking at one of your towers shows that tower's upgrade cost the same way. Both are green when you can afford them and red when you cannot. Holding the Sell tool and looking at a tower instead shows just that tower's sell value — always green, with no gold total, since selling pays you.

Nameplates and floating tags

• Every enemy carries a red heart bar (♥/♡, up to ten hearts) as its nameplate.
• From wave 10 onward, enemies with armor also carry a shield bar (🛡/X) floating just above the hearts.
• Enemies that rolled the wave's elemental attunement carry a coloured element tag above that.
• Every Basic Tower carries a stat stack above it — always Damage and Attack Speed, plus one line per support bonus actually attached. Support towers carry their own element tag.
• Every kill that pays gold spawns a floating +N gold tag at the mob's head.

The Placement Highlight

A translucent stained-glass slab tracks whichever grid square your crosshair is on, refreshed every 2 ticks out to 25 blocks. Its colour tells you whether you can build there:

Colour	Meaning
Lime	Buildable — empty and not a start/end tile
Red	A tower is already on this square
Light blue	A start or end tile, permanently non-buildable
Nothing shown	Your crosshair is outside the play area

The slab is client-side scenery only: it is a BlockDisplay, not a real block, so it never affects pathing or collisions.

Match Rules

While you are in a level instance:

• You are invulnerable and flying, at fly speed 0.3.
• Breaking and placing blocks is cancelled.
• Every right-click except one made with the written guide book is cancelled outright, which stops vanilla item use. EternalTD's own build/upgrade/sell handler runs earlier in the event chain, so match items still work — the cancel only strips the vanilla behaviour that would otherwise ride along.
• Bows and other projectiles cannot be fired.
• Inventory clicks are cancelled by default. Clicks in the upper rows (slot 9 and above) are re-allowed when there is an item there, and the support-tower row is rebuilt half a second later so nothing goes missing. Clicking an occupied hotbar slot consumes that match item instead — they are all freely re-obtainable from the rows above.
• The instance world itself blocks explosions, liquid flow, elytra, fly toggling, friendly fire and vanilla mob spawning.
• Wave enemies take no vanilla damage, burn nothing, drop no items or XP, and never transform (no zombie villagers, no drowned conversions).

Things That End Your Run

Any of these tears the session down cleanly — inventory restored, towers removed, instance world deleted:

• /etd quit or /etd hub
• Losing your last life
• Running out of waves with no sudden-death pool configured
• Dying
• Disconnecting from the server
• Any teleport at all once the run is live. The handler does not compare worlds, so a teleport within the instance world ends the session just as a teleport out of it does; only EternalTD's own entry teleport is exempt (it is covered by an internal flag)
• A server shutdown or /etd reload

Ending is idempotent: /etd quit immediately followed by /etd hub will not double-tear-down the session.

When a run ends, the server gets a broadcast naming you and the wave you reached, and — if you did not cheat and you beat the map's stored record — a second broadcast announcing the new high score. Each time a new wave starts, the server is also told that you are now on that wave of that map.

The Guide Book

Slot 0 (and slot 9) holds a written book generated from the playerGuide value in config.yml. The default text walks a new player through lives, gold, tower basics, each tower type, every wave property, and a few build strategies. <br> in that config value splits the text into book pages, and &-codes are converted to colours.

Because the book is the one item whose right-click is not cancelled inside a match, players can open it mid-run without it counting as a build action.

Editing playerGuide and running /etd reload regenerates the book; the generated item is cached and only rebuilt when the config text actually changes.