The ledger
Every player carries a debt measured in hours. It grows at 1x while you play and nobody counts as company, is paid down at 2x while you play alongside someone, and is slowly forgiven while you are AFK or logged off, about 1.2 hours per real day, so a holiday does not leave you permanently handicapped. It is capped at 24 hours, and every penalty is a pure function of the number, so every stage is reversible.
Tip: One evening together clears two evenings alone. That ratio is the whole design.
The ladder
With default settings: under 3 hours of debt, nothing. A warning arrives half an hour before the budget runs out. From 3 to 6 hours, yields decay smoothly from 100 percent down to a 10 percent floor. At 7 hours, lockdown. At 9 hours, a 12-hour temp ban, after which the ledger is wiped clean. A player who solos three hours every evening hits diminishing returns the first night, lockdown around the fourth, and the ban around the fifth; the same hours with a friend online trigger nothing at all.
What counts as alone
Configurable, three ways. SERVER, the default, means you are solo whenever fewer than two players are online at all, which is the rule that stops the 4am session. WORLD means nobody else in your world; RADIUS means nobody within a set distance, for groups who share a server but not a neighbourhood. An AFK player is not company (five minutes without input, on the same idle clock vanilla uses), and neither is anyone in spectator or hidden by a vanish plugin.
Tip: Parking an alt account at spawn buys you nothing. It goes AFK and stops counting.
Diminishing returns
The decay applies to ore drops from a configurable list of valuable blocks, mob drops, mining and mob experience, fishing, freshly opened container loot and villager trades. Nothing is ever deleted from an inventory and nothing is rolled back: diminished yields simply never spawn. A diminished player can still dig, fight, travel and build; they just stop getting rich while nobody is looking.
Lockdown
At 7 hours of debt your hands stop working for construction: no placing blocks, no emptying buckets, no placing boats, minecarts or paintings. Breaking blocks stays allowed by default, deliberately, so nobody gets entombed in their own base. You can still mine, fight, travel and log off.
The ban settles the account
At 9 hours you are kicked and temp-banned for 12 hours, long enough that the solo session is genuinely over, short enough to be back tomorrow evening. By default the ledger resets to zero when the ban lands: you served the time, so the account is settled. Admins can raise reset-debt-to-hours to make the ban a warning shot instead, or disable it entirely.
Who is left alone
Anyone with the bypass permission, anyone in creative or spectator, anyone in a world on the exempt list, and anyone with under 5 hours of total playtime on the server, so nobody's first evening is spent under a penalty they do not understand yet. Admins get /gs status, top, set, add, clear, pardon, reload and save; /gs pardon lifts the ban and clears the ledger in one move.
