On the client side requirement

[BeeFox-sys]

While this wouldn't help for pre 1.19.4; block displays could be used to give a border to the block.

Alternatively you could have it be a transparent block (eg red stained glass) with a marker armorstand with a redstone block in the head slot in order to have it display within the block.

I suggest polymer for either of these options as it is really good at creating server side mods that have custom things on the client side.

[meza]

I have looked into all these options (with quite a lot of effort) but none of them offer a good player experience unfortunately. Maybe once people stop using versions that are from before 1.19.4, we could have a decent vanilla-esque solution that's also easy to use for people.

That said, it might just be a skill issue on my side so if anyone can send a PR or an example, I'd love to see it :D

[BeeFox-sys]

I'll have a play at some point maybe c:

[meza]

Awesome! The important things are that the players need to be able to "acquire" these blocks. In one experiment I used a stick renamed to "server" to whack a redstone block and that would turn the redstone block into a Server Redstone Block.

The issue I faced then is the second requirement: players need to be able to identify these blocks, so the appearance needs to change somehow. I've experimented with particles, block displays, etc but they all have limitations that aren't acceptible.

With the stick method it stated to get really cumbersome to make the user feedback good. As in make the stick different a bit, have some sort of a feeling of an action has been done with the click, etc.

While technically there's a lot of ways to make this server side only, I wouldn't like to give up on the player experience if that makes sense. If it's hard to use or understand, nobody will use it :)

[meza]

Also I think I could live with a solution where pre-1.19.4 versions don't offer as server-side only solution. I don't think that's unreasonable