Global vs Individual Stages

History Stages has two progression models: Global (server-wide) and Individual (per-player). Both can run side by side in the same modpack, but they lock different things and behave differently for the player. Which one a stage is depends only on which folder its file sits in.

What can each one lock?

Not every lock type works in both modes. Pick the wrong stage type and your lock is silently ignored — you will only see it in debug-*.log.

Lock type	Global	Individual
Items / blocks (use, attack, equip, pickup, place, break, gui)	yes	yes
Tags	yes	yes
Mods (incl. mod_exceptions)	yes	yes
NBT items	yes	yes
Fluids (what a bucket or tank is carrying)	yes	yes
Recipes	yes	yes, at manned stations
Loot tables (replace/remove in chests and drops)	yes	yes
Dimensions	yes	yes
Structures	yes	yes
Structure generation caps (block_generation)	yes	no
Biomes	yes	yes
Zones (areas you draw yourself)	yes	yes, except "no mob spawns"
attacklock (player cannot attack the mob)	yes	yes
interactionlock (breed/mount/trade/leash/…)	yes	yes
spawnlock (mob does not spawn at all)	yes	no
Merchant offers (trades → offers)	yes	yes
Merchant professions and levels	yes	yes
Enchantments	yes	yes
lose_on_death	no	yes

Why three of them are one-sided. spawnlock is a world-global mechanic: a mob spawn does not know who it is appearing for, and an individual lock needs a concrete player ("this player just tried to use this item"). A zone's no mob spawns switch is the same question in a different place and is likewise global-only; everything else a zone does has a player standing in it and works in both. block_generation is the same class of reason — world generation happens once, permanently, for the whole world, so there is no per-player chunk to gate. lose_on_death is the mirror case: there is no single player whose death should relock a stage shared by the whole server.

Fluids work in both, because a fluid is only ever asked about with a player at hand. The one place that breaks down is the recipe side of a fluid lock on an individual stage: it reaches only the stations that know who is crafting, exactly as recipes does.

How the player experiences it

Global and Individual lock at different layers

This is the part that trips most people up. Listing the same item in a global stage and in an individual stage does very different things.

Global stage: the recipe goes away.

While the stage is locked, every recipe whose output is the locked item is filtered out of the RecipeManager. That covers every recipe type the game has:

• Crafting table and crafter
• Furnace, smoker, blast furnace, campfire
• Stonecutter, smithing table
• Brewing stand
• Custom recipe types from KubeJS, CraftTweaker, and other mods

The item cannot be produced. No one on the server can craft it. JEI and EMI show a lock overlay, or hide the recipe entirely if hideLockedItemsInJei or hideLockedRecipesInJei is on. The recipes field works as a more surgical tool on top of this, removing specific recipe ids by hand when you only want one of several variants gone.

One exception: an item entry can leave recipe out of the lock. unlock_actions lists the actions that stay free, so "unlock_actions": ["recipe"] keeps the recipe craftable while everything else about the item stays gated. → Unlock Actions.

Individual stage: the item refuses to land in the inventory.

The recipe stays in the registry. Any unlocked player can craft it like normal. For a locked player, several mechanics work together so the item never actually ends up in their inventory:

• Picking it up off the ground is blocked.
• Clicking it in any slot of any container — chest, crafting table output, anywhere — is cancelled as soon as the locked player tries to grab it.
• On login, the server scans the player's inventory and drops any stack whose pickup action is now locked for them. This is how the system catches items that became locked while the player was offline.
• The regular action locks (use, equip, place, …) still apply if the item somehow lands in their hand anyway, for example through /give from an operator.

So the recipe still exists, but a locked player cannot have the item. An unlocked player can stand at the same crafting table and produce it without anything stopping them. Only the locked player is shut out.

The pickup block can be turned off with lockItemPickup in [individual_stages] (default on); the container click block is a separate switch, lockContainerInteraction. → gameplay.toml.

Per-player recipe locks, and where they stop

Since 6.0 the recipes field also works inside an individual stage, and so does an item entry whose recipe action is locked. Both are gated per player at the stations that know who is standing at them:

• Crafting table
• The 2×2 grid in the player's own inventory
• Stonecutter
• Smithing table

At those four, an individual stage does exactly what a global one does: the result slot stays empty, and for the stonecutter the locked recipe is not even offered as a button. Two players can stand at the same crafting table and get different results.

Everywhere else it stays global-only, because there is no player to ask:

• Furnace, blast furnace, smoker, campfire
• Brewing stand
• The crafter block, hopper feeds, and mod autocrafters
• Any mod station with its own menu whose recipe type has not been registered as per-player-gateable

Another mod can add to that list. Since 6.0.0 a mod may declare one of its own recipe types per-player-gateable, and the editor then offers it like the built-in three. That is a promise about the mod's own station — that a player is standing at it and that our hooks see them — so the list above is the vanilla floor rather than the whole of it. → Addon Development.

warning

A recipe locked by an individual stage can still be produced in an autocrafter. That is acceptable for progression design — a professions system, a research tree — and it is not cheat protection. If something has to be genuinely unobtainable, use a global stage.

Anvil, loom and cartography table are absent from both lists: they are not recipe-driven in the first place. Vanilla has exactly seven recipe types, and those three stations use none of them, so there is no recipe id to write into a stage.

The switch for all of this is lockRecipes in [individual_stages], on by default. → Recipes has the whole picture.

Mob spawns (Global only)

entities.spawnlock stops a mob from appearing in the world at all. That is a world-global decision, so per-player does not make sense for it. It exists only for global stages.

attacklock is the individual-friendly version. The mob spawns normally and unlocked players can attack it, but for a locked player every attack is cancelled.

Items, blocks, dimensions, structures

The lock mechanism is the same in both modes. What changes is who the lock applies to.

• Global: once unlocked, the content is free for every player on the server. New joiners walk into the already-unlocked state.
• Individual: every player has to unlock the stage themselves. New joiners start with nothing, regardless of what other players have done.

This is why player A can be wandering through the End while player B is still scraping by in the Stone Age. Normal for individual stages, impossible for global ones.

Which dependencies each one can use

A stage can demand conditions before it may be researched, and which kinds are available depends on the stage type. The split is not arbitrary: a per-player condition needs a clearly defined researcher. An individual scroll has a fixed owner from the moment research starts. A global scroll has no owner.

Both stage types can demand items and item tags at the pedestal, another global stage, an individual stage held collectively, and a scoreboard objective.

Individual stages add four that need a specific player: advancements, XP level, entity kill counts, and tracked statistics. Written into a global stage by hand they are not stripped out — the checker simply skips them rather than measuring them against whoever last opened the pedestal.

→ Dependencies has every condition, the AND/OR rules, and the individual_stages modes.

Lose on Death

An individual stage can relock itself when its owner dies:

{ "lose_on_death": true }

Global stages cannot use it — there is no single player whose death should relock a stage the whole server shares. The field is omitted entirely rather than written as false when it is off.

The relock happens on death itself, not on respawn, so the stage's newly re-locked items are included in the player's death drops. Combined with keepInventory, this makes specific progression items the only thing a player risks losing on death.

If the stage is in temporary mode with a running timer, dying ends that timer early and starts the cooldown as if it had expired naturally, without counting against max_triggers any differently than a normal expiry.

Dual-Phase: when both lists target the same content

If the same entry appears in a global stage and in an individual stage, History Stages turns on the Dual-Phase Lock for it automatically. Every category takes part except two: mod_exceptions, which carves holes rather than locking, and spawnlock, which has no individual side to overlap with. So items, fluids, tags, mods, recipes, dimensions, structures, biomes, zones, attack and interaction locks, and all three trade categories are covered.

1. Phase 1 (Global): locked for everyone until the global stage is unlocked server-wide. The recipe is also blocked during this phase, as above.
2. Phase 2 (Individual): once the global unlock happens, the recipe becomes craftable again, but each player still cannot use or pick up the item until they unlock their individual stage themselves.

Dual-phase entries get a [Dual] badge in the in-game editor and their own lock icon in the player's inventory.

Pitfalls

• Ids must be unique within a tree, not across the two. Two files called iron_age.json in different subfolders of global/ collide — the alphabetically first path is kept, the other is skipped with an error in the debug log. The same id in global/ and individual/ is fine, and is how a dual-phase lock is written.
• Recipe locks in an individual stage reach only manned stations — four in vanilla, more if a mod registers its own. A furnace or an autocrafter ignores them. Before 6.0 they were stripped out at load time entirely; they are now kept.
• An individual item lock does not touch the recipe. Other players can craft the item right next to a locked player without anything happening. The lock only bites when the locked player tries to obtain or use it.
• Individual unlocks are not retroactive. /history individual unlock @a stage_x reaches only players online at that moment. Anyone joining later has to be unlocked separately, or clear the dependency chain themselves.
• /history reload does not change unlock state. It only re-reads definitions. Rename a stage and every unlock on the old id is gone.