ghost-width (64 by default) past the border, on ground another shard owns. That is what makes a border feel like nothing is there. It also means your claims and region plugin has to be able to stop it, and whether it can depends on where your claims live.
How a cross-border edit is checked
Every break and place across a border goes through three steps, and protection gets a say in two of them.1
Ask the owner
The player’s own break or place is cancelled at once, so nothing on their server treats the attempt as an edit yet. The shard that owns the block is asked. It raises
ShardRemoteEditEvent: its protection can refuse here. If nobody does, it holds the block for a few seconds.2
Confirm on the player's shard
Only now does the player’s own server raise an ordinary
BlockBreakEvent or BlockPlaceEvent for the edit. Every plugin there sees it exactly as a normal edit by that player: its protection can still refuse it.3
Commit
The owner makes the change and says what dropped. The player gets the drops, the tool wears down, the placed block is spent.
Which setup you have
- Claims every shard can read
- Claims kept per server
A claims plugin that stores its claims in a database every shard reads — built to be cross-server, or pointed at one shared MySQL — already knows about land on the other side of the border. It refuses the edit in step 2, on the player’s own shard, with no extra setup.The same goes for region plugins configured identically on every shard, such as the same WorldGuard regions on all of them: the player’s shard checks the coordinates against the same regions the owner would.Nothing to do. A bridge on the owner (below) is still worth having as a second check, but it is not required.
A bridge for per-server claims
A small plugin on every shard that listens forShardRemoteEditEvent and asks your claims plugin the question it would have asked about a local edit. The player is not online on that server, so ask by UUID.
action() tells you whether it is a BREAK, a PLACE or a HIT on an entity, so a bridge can protect pets and villagers in a claim too. Install it on every shard: each one is the owner of its own region.
Jobs, economy and skill plugins
They see each successful cross-border edit once, on the player’s shard, as a normalBlockBreakEvent or BlockPlaceEvent — so mining across a border pays the same as mining at your feet. An edit refused at any step never raises an event there, so it cannot be farmed by swinging at a protected block.
The owner’s shard raises no Bukkit block event for the edit at all, so nothing pays twice.
What else is guarded
- Drops from mirrored ground. The other side of the border is a copy on your shard. A plugin that answers a break by breaking the blocks around it — vein miners, tree fellers — would otherwise drop real items from that copy while the real blocks still stand on the owner. Atlas refuses any entity spawning on ground your shard does not own, so those drops never appear.
- Items carrying their own data — a filled shulker box, a named or written block — cannot be placed across a border, since only the block’s state is forwarded.
- Containers, doors and anything with a screen cannot be used across a border at all.
Hitting across a border
Hitting a mob’s ghost forwards the hit to the owner, which raisesShardRemoteEditEvent with HIT before applying it. There is no attacker on that server, so kill credit, statistics and advancements are not awarded. Hitting another player’s ghost does nothing: there is no cross-border PvP.