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Plugin Restrictions

Dalamud plugin development, by its nature, interferes with the game's functioning and changes the experience as intended by Square Enix. This makes it very important to ensure that your plugin does not do anything that a human player could not do; Dalamud plugins should enhance the experience, not radically alter it.

Please make sure that, as much as possible:

  • your plugin does not interact with the game servers in a way that is:
    • automatic, as in polling data or making requests without direct interaction from the user
    • outside of specification, as in allowing the player to do or submit things to the server that would not be possible by normal means
  • your plugin does not augment, alter, or interfere with combat, unless it only provides information about your own party or alliance members that is otherwise available, but represents said information differently.
    • Reach out to the approval team before submitting a plugin that fits the description above. We do not accept submissions of combat plugins that were not previously communicated, as we want to avoid having people do the work of creating a submission only to have it be rejected.
    • Note that there are plugins on the repository that do not abide by this rule, but they have been grandfathered and similar plugins will not be allowed.
  • your plugin does not interfere with Square Enix's monetary interests (i.e. granting access to Mog Station items)
  • your plugin does not provide parsing, raid logging, DPS meters, or similar (i.e. information beyond what is traditionally available to players)
  • your plugin does not collect account IDs of player characters beyond your own in any form, regardless of the intended use or whether it is exposed to users
  • your plugin does not have a hard dependency on any plugin that violates the Plugin Guidelines.
  • your plugin is not only useful in out-of-spec scenarios (e.g., out-of-bounds areas, etc.). Even if a plugin doesn't directly violate guidelines, if it only serves to enhance or facilitate behavior that is outside the game's intended specifications, it will not be allowed. This is because such plugins tacitly encourage behavior that we cannot support or discuss within our community.

Certain plugins may be subject to certain additional constraints or review based on their featureset, potential impact to the ecosystem, and other factors. Plugin review is a subjective process and many factors go into making a decision for any specific plugin.

Common Non-Starters​

The following are common plugin requests that will not be allowed, along with explanations:

  • Emote/Expression Looping: Violates automation rules. The game explicitly indicates when an emote is persistent.
  • Skip Cutscenes: Violates automation rules, especially for unskippable cutscenes.
  • Skip Dialog Boxes: Violates automation rules.
  • Automated Crafting: Violates automation rules.
  • Autoroll on Loot: Violates automation rules. (Note: Plugins that enhance the loot selection UI without automation, like "Select Next Loot Item Tweak", are allowed.)
  • Friend List Login/Out Alerts: Technically impossible without external servers, as FFXIV only sends friends list data when actively opened.
  • Visible AOE Markers for Non-Telegraphed Mechanics: Considered cheating and not allowed.
  • Camera Zoom Adjustments: Violates guidelines, can provide unfair advantages in battle content, and can break cutscenes. Plugins that stay within normal game bounds are allowed.
  • FFLogs Integration: Use ACT instead. We prefer to maintain distance from this aspect of FFXIV.
  • Damage Parser / ACT as Plugin: Use ACT or alternatives instead. Similar to FFLogs, we prefer to maintain distance from this aspect of FFXIV.
  • Avoiding Fantasia: Violates guidelines by attempting to bypass Mog Station purchases.
  • More XIV Combos: Not allowed. See XIVComboPlugin issue #119 for details.
  • AOE Recoloring: Not allowed due to potential gameplay advantages and consistency issues.

I'm not sure if my plugin idea violates the guidelines!​

If you are not sure whether your plugin will be allowed, please contact us in the Dalamud Discord before you start work on it. Members of the Plugin Approval Committee or Dalamud staff will evaluate your idea and let you know if there are any risk factors that may put it in breach of one of our guidelines. We highly suggest you ask us to weigh in on an idea before starting to work on it - it's not a good feeling for anyone when we need to reject a completed plugin that breaks our rules.

It's not particularly uncommon for a newly-submitted plugin to unintentionally violate one or more guidelines. When this happens, the Plugin Approval Committee will leave detailed commentary explaining the nature of the violation as well as possible remediations in your plugin submission. We ultimately want your plugin to be on our repository, so we are very willing to work with developers to find a solution or workaround that makes everyone happy.

Why do you discourage certain types of plugins?​

Dalamud and XIVLauncher were made by me with the goal to do cool stuff with a game I love, and give others the chance to do so while making the game itself more accessible. I don't want to cause harm to the game, its community or Square Enix. Plugins that fall outside of the definition of "acceptable" that we set as a collective create a divide and debate that we don't want to be a part of.

This stance of mine has narrowed down as XIVLauncher has gained popularity, as you may notice by going through some of the first plugins to be added.

Obviously, this comes from a moral point of view, which may differ from yours - and the rules and decisions I make may sometimes seem unjustified - but I want to minimize the risk of Square Enix taking action and taking away the things we built, while degrading the general user experience of their game.

I can't and don't want to control anyone that makes free software based on my work, but I would like to ask you to consider and empathize with my opinion when creating software that depends on Dalamud.

- goat, the lead developer of XIVLauncher/Dalamud

I don't like plugin X, can you block it or delete it?​

While there are various plugins from custom repositories that do violate our rules, there is very little we can do as a project to prevent this.

  • If we were to introduce blocks or bans, they would be trivial to circumvent. It would be minutes of effort to do so. Dalamud is open source software - everything we do is public, there is no secret code or private tools and everything can be reproduced. This has obvious drawbacks, but it allows anyone to inspect what code runs on their machine, and this openness has ultimately led to the ecosystem of amazing plugins and extensions we have today.
  • In our official channels, we try to avoid helping anyone that tries to make plugins that may violate our rules or ethics. This is not always possible, as we are not immune to deception or politics.
  • Most ready-to-use APIs offered by Dalamud itself are read-only and don't allow changing the actual state of the game. Plugins run on your PC like any other program and are not "sandboxed", so they have free rein to interact with the game in any way they please with their own code.
  • Limiting what plugins can do is a very difficult technical problem, and might lead to a lot of very popular plugins not being able to do what they do anymore for the limitations to be worthwhile. We don't want to introduce artificial limitations that break existing plugins that have become essential to the community that uses Dalamud.

If you have a problem with a plugin on the official repository, we recommend reading the plugin submission guidelines above to get some background on how we decide if a plugin should be on the official repo. If you still think that the plugin should not be there, feel free to reach out to a member of our team via Discord.

I like custom repo plugin X, why is it not on the official repo?​

There are various reasons for why a plugin might not be on the official repo.

  • It doesn't conform to our rules and guidelines above.
  • It only works in conjunction with another custom repo plugin. This doesn't necessarily mean that the plugin in question, or the plugin it depends on, violate our rules and guidelines.
  • The developer decided not to submit it to the official repo. We don't just "take" plugins and put them there, plugin developers need to go out of their way to submit their work to our repository. Some may prefer to run their own infrastructure, for various reasons - a main one being that updates on the official repo may take a while to be processed, as they are code-reviewed by the plugin approval team.