Added a new compatibility layer (powered by XSeries) so one jar now runs from 1.12 right through to 1.21.8 without material or sound name crashes.
Fixed the Hiscore GUI: per-player heads render again, the rank counter increments properly, and filler items no longer break on legacy versions.
Hologram admin commands now validate their arguments and reply with usage hints instead of throwing errors when something is mistyped.
Improved MySQL bootstrap: the players table is created with a valid schema, connections close cleanly, and startup now preloads hi-scores even for flat-file users.
PlaceholderAPI expansion reports live plugin version info and gracefully handles missing ranks (returns "N/A" or "0" instead of erroring).
Unified game start sounds across versions by mapping configured sound names through the compatibility layer.
Removed the hard-coded api-version flag to keep backwards compatibility with 1.12 while still playing nicely with modern servers.
General polish passes on score handling, hologram refreshes, and console logging (especially after /reload).
Reminder: Minecraft 1.20.5+ servers still require Java 21 at runtime even though the jar is compiled for Java 8 for legacy support.