Lag
Five kinds of lag and three levels: what the cheater feels, for how long, and when lag doesn’t kick in.
3 min
Lag is the nastiest thing you can do to a cheater short of a ban: hits don’t land, they get pulled back, the camera jerks around. It looks like a bad connection, and they just lose the fight.
Kinds
| Kind | What happens |
|---|---|
| Hit delay | Hits and swings reach the server late. |
| Misses | Some hits don’t count: the swing shows, but no damage or knockback. |
| Setbacks | The player is pulled back a few ticks. |
| Grounding | Pulls them down: lower jumps, no hanging in the air. Never pushes sideways. |
| Forced turn | The player’s camera is turned away. |
Levels
| Light | Medium | Heavy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delay | 100 ms | 250 ms | 500 ms |
| Misses | 50 %, up to 3 in a row | 75 %, up to 8 in a row | all |
| Setbacks | every 3–5 s, 3 ticks | every 1.5–3 s, 5 ticks | every 0.5–1 s, 10 ticks |
| Turn | every 3–5 s, 10–20° | every 1.5–3 s, 20–45° | every 0.5–1.5 s, 45–90° |
| Grounding | lower jumps | barely lift | pinned down |
On light and medium, setbacks and turns only happen in a fight, meaning the player hit someone or got hit by a player in the last 5 seconds. On heavy they always happen, so running away doesn’t work.
When there’s no lag
- While a player is being recorded for the dataset (
/mlsac start), no lag applies to them at all, since it would chop the recording into pieces. Other suppression and commands still work, and the lag resumes when recording stops. - In creative, spectator, and in regions or worlds without checks.
- For players with
mlsac.suppression.bypass. It’s part ofmlsac.admin, so you can’t test lag on an op account.