What it does
In a single pass Nuker breaks everything within reach without waiting for the player to look at a block: a whole sphere or layer disappears around them. It's usually set to be picky — only ores, only crops, only beds — and then it works quietly and precisely.
In BedWars it takes out beds; on anarchy and in griefing it chews through bases and wrecks builds near spawn; on survival it mows down fields and ore veins in seconds. The damage is twofold: the players who get hit, and an economy where farmers and miners suddenly lose to one person. Paired with X-Ray it strips ore cleanly, which is why such servers also need X-Ray protection.
How to spot it
- Blocks vanish all around the player at once, including behind them and under their feet
- Only the ores drop out of a wall while the stone around them stays intact
- A field is harvested in a strip along the player's path, though they never turn to the crops
How it gets caught
An honest client digs one block at a time, and only the one it's looking at. Nuker gives itself away in several ways at once: multiple blocks broken in one tick, blocks breaking behind the player or where they never looked, a series finished faster than the sum of each block's break time, and distances beyond reach — about 4.5 blocks from the eyes in survival.
A single outlier happens to honest players too — a block at the very edge of reach, a burst of packets after a freeze. The sign of Nuker is when it repeats block after block.