Voice Guard

A LabyMod 4 addon that inverts the default of the official VoiceChat addon. Every voice chat participant starts muted, and you unmute only the people you want to hear.

VoiceChat can only mute reactively: somebody joins, and you mute them after you have already heard them. If the first thing they say is abuse, the damage is done. Voice Guard flips that around, so nothing is audible until you say so.

How it works

VoiceChat stores a per player volume map in its configuration, and a player is locally muted exactly when their volume is <= 0:

// net.labymod.addons.voicechat.api.configuration.VoiceChatConfiguration
float getVolumeOf(UUID uniqueId);                                       // default 1.0
default boolean isLocallyMuted(UUID uniqueId) { return getVolumeOf(uniqueId) <= 0; }

Voice Guard writes 0 into that same map through the public API, which is exactly what VoiceChat's own mute button does. Nothing is patched, mixed in, or reflected into.

The important hook is AudioStreamStartEvent. VoiceChat creates the audio stream, fires the event, and only then queues the first packet of audio, so muting there means not a single frame of a stranger's voice is ever played.

Unmuting

There are three ways, and they all do the same thing:

• Middle click a player and choose Unmute.
• Run /vg and click their name in the listing.
• Raise their volume slider in VoiceChat's own user panel.

Whichever you use, Voice Guard notices, hands that player back to you, and remembers them so they stay audible the next time you meet, on any server. Unmuting is a decision about a person rather than about a server, so it is deliberately not scoped to one. /vg shows only players present where you are, and /vg all shows the full list for pruning.

Staying out of the way

• Only players with no volume entry at all are touched, so any volume you chose is never overridden.
• Every mute it applies is recorded and persisted, so its own entries can always be told apart from yours and cleaned up, even after a crash.
• Turning the addon off removes only its mutes and leaves yours alone.

Commands

Command	Effect
/vg	Players currently in voice range: who you can hear and who was auto muted. Every name is clickable.
/vg all	Your standing decisions across every server: unmuted by you, muted by you.
/vg mute <name>	Mutes that player.
/vg unmute <name>	Unmutes that player.

/voiceguard works as the long form of all three.

Shortly after joining a server the addon prints a short summary of how many players you can hear and how many were auto muted.

In both listings, green always means you can hear them and red always means you cannot; the labels say why. /vg deliberately shows only players in voice range, since those are the ones you can act on, and points at /vg all for the rest.

Settings

The toggle beside the addon name is the master switch. Turning it off releases every mute the addon applied and hands your microphone back; your own manual mutes are kept.

Setting	Default	Meaning
Mute everyone by default	on	Players you have not unmuted start muted. Turn this off to run the addon for the microphone feature alone.
Always hear friends	on	Players on your LabyMod friends list are never muted automatically.
Remember who I unmute	on	Unmutes persist across sessions. Off means they last until you quit.
Auto mute microphone	off	Mutes your own microphone while a muted player is close enough to hear you.
Distance that counts as earshot	24	How near a muted player must be, in blocks, before the guard engages.

A note on the microphone guard

Muting somebody stops you hearing them. It does not stop them hearing you, and no client side addon can change that: your voice leaves the machine as a single unaddressed buffer that the voice server copies to every listener, so there is no way to exclude one person from it.

The microphone guard is the only honest approximation. While a muted player is within the configured radius it switches your microphone off entirely, which guarantees they cannot hear you at the cost of nobody else hearing you either. It is off by default for that reason.

Building

Requires JDK 21. On macOS: brew install openjdk@21.

./gradlew createReleaseJar

The installable addon is written to build/libs/voiceguard-release.jar.

icon.png in the repository root is the 512x512 master, which is also the image the addon store uses. The 256x256 copy shipped inside the jar lives at core/src/main/resources/assets/voiceguard/textures/icon.png.

The VoiceChat API is not published to Maven and does not need to be vendored. The addon("voicechat") line in build.gradle.kts makes labygradle download the published addon and place it on the compile classpath, so this repository contains no third party code.

Installing for testing

Copy build/libs/voiceguard-release.jar into your LabyMod addons folder:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\.minecraft\labymod-neo\addons\
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/labymod-neo/addons/
• Linux: ~/.minecraft/labymod-neo/addons/

Restart the game. Voice Guard appears in the LabyMod settings under its own category.

Automated checks

The mute decisions run outside Minecraft, so they can be checked on any machine:

./gradlew :core:classes && verify/run.sh

This exercises the real AutoMuteService against a stubbed volume map and covers muting on sight, never muting yourself, never overriding a volume you chose, detecting a manual unmute, the allowlist, the friend exemption, releasing on disable, cleaning up mutes left by a crashed session, and the microphone guard's state machine.

Testing in game

The checks above cannot produce real audio, a second player, or VoiceChat's own configuration file, so these four are verified by hand in game. Run them after changing anything in AutoMuteService.

1. Zero leak: join a public voice channel and have a second account talk the instant it joins. You should hear nothing, and VoiceChat's user panel should already show them muted.
2. Selective unmute: unmute them by any of the three routes. Audio returns immediately, and they are still audible after a rejoin.
3. Friend exemption: with Always hear friends on, adding somebody as a friend makes them audible without a restart.
4. No configuration damage: mute somebody yourself, disable the addon, then check labymod-neo/configs/voicechat/settings.json. Your own playerVolumes entry must survive.