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.

Muting and unmuting stays in VoiceChat's own controls: middle click a player and choose VoiceChat, or run /vm <name>. Voice Guard notices either one and remembers an unmute, so that player stays audible on any server.

It also stays out of your 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

/vg lists the players in voice range, split into who you can hear and who was auto muted. Hover a name to see why it is in its group. /voiceguard is the long form. The command only reports; it never changes anything.

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

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.
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. Copy it into your LabyMod addons folder and restart the game:

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

store-assets/icon.png 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.