Stock Velocity will not offer the login-plugin-message exchange below 1.13, so a
1.8 client reaching a modern-forwarding backend today is a side effect of Via
replacing the channel initialisers before that check runs. It works, and nobody
designed it. FL-008's fork registers the two login packets from 1.7.2 and drops
the handshake gate, which makes the same outcome deliberate — and its gateonly
control shows the registry half is the load-bearing one.
FELIS_VELOCITY_FORK_JAR points at such a build; unset, the default, nothing
changes and the stock 3.5.1 download runs as before. It stays opt-in because the
fork is unmeasured where it counts: FL-008's probe runs offline-mode against a
stub backend, while this jar would carry every real Mojang session on the server.
No digest is pinned for it. The gradle build is not byte-reproducible across
machines, so a hash here would assert a provenance that does not exist; the jar
is trusted because that probe certified a build, and the path is checked for
readability before anything is replaced.
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