Deprecated Frameworks

Three standalone libraries, each fully absorbed into Essentials (Ess) as native code before any mod had much chance to build on the standalone versions. They’re kept here only as historical reference — the reasoning and source on these pages is real and accurate, but none of the three is maintained, deployed, or the thing to start a new mod on. If you’re looking for the current equivalent, follow the Ess.X link in each entry below.

• Contract Framework → now Ess.Contract — a save-safe, ephemeral custom-mission system: objectives, triggers, support call-ins, AI orders, and a player-facing board — all built from primitives that never touch the game’s save file, paired with an in-game Forge-style authoring tool and a web finisher for non-programmers.
• UI Kit → now Ess.UI — nine reusable HUD widgets (menus, lists, dialogs, a chat log, a two-pane board) sharing one input/focus/heartbeat engine, so building custom UI never means solving “widget, input, drawing, lifecycle” from scratch.
• ModNet → now Ess.Net — a co-op data-sync library over Net.SendCustomEvent: synced state with last-writer-wins conflict resolution, named messages carrying arbitrary Lua values (not just numbers), and a raw escape hatch — the same chunked-transport technique A Basic Co-op Text Chat and its current implementation solve once, generalized for anything a co-op mod needs to keep in sync.

WaveDefense — the worked example of gluing all three together into a real gamemode — stays in Frameworks rather than moving here: it’s an example built on these libraries, not one of the libraries itself, and its own page already notes plainly which now-deprecated pieces it depends on.