As mentioned before, inkipadi is designed for vanilla-style servers. It's intended to be used with minimal other plugins, on servers that hardly stray from vanilla multiplayer gameplay at all.

Simplicity is the core of the plugin. There isn't any plugin customization. Once you learn how it works from one server, you know exactly how it'll work on all others too.

This means:

- Setting up portal pads never changes.
It's always a sign in the same place, with the same single keyword on line 1.

- The portal pad frame never changes.
Once you know how to build it, you know how to build it forever.

- Decorating portal pads never changes.
It's always the same required frame pieces, that you learn once and know forever.

- Portal pad teleporting behaviour never changes.
You always stand on the same block, and you're always teleported instantly.

- The amount of portal pads per player never changes.
Everyone gets 1 pair of their own each, to use however they'd wish.

The portal pads are designed to be a better version of the nether's fast travel.

The nether's fast travel has a few flaws in multiplayer:

- Too slow. Even with highways and rail systems, it can take minutes to visit one person on the opposite side of the overworld, and then minutes to get back. This generally means people won't bother taking the time of leaving their current task for a while to visit others at all. Vanilla Minecraft Beta has no faster travel options.

- (Generally) Requires building highways. The most efficient way is a single flat line of blocks travelling horizontally. This is both boring and hinders creativity.

- Dangerous. This could be considered a fair trade-off for fast travel, but this in turn forces players to build close to each other in the overworld, if they don't want to risk dying / getting lost in the nether.

- Minor annoyances. Players often build nether portals in alternate places slightly away from their builds, solely to not hear the noise constantly. In addition, the concept of waiting in a portal just to visit one dimension, for the sole purpose of travelling and wait in another portal to immediately leave the dimension, isn't the best gameplay system.

But, the nether portals have a good aspect that everyone is familiar with. They cost fourteen (ten minimum) obsidian to create. This means:

- Nether portals are locked to being an end-game tool. You need a diamond pickaxe, and a water bucket to pour over lava.

- Nether portals are 'expensive', in the sense that obsidian is time-consuming to obtain, and not readily available above ground.

- Nether portals incentivize you to think carefully about where you're placing them. They take a while to destroy if you change your mind.

With all that said, this is how the portal pads are balanced:

- Requires glowstone, alongside thirteen obsidian blocks. This puts them one step further than nether portals as the new ultimate end-game fast travel tool, as you must create and travel through a nether portal first to obtain glowstone.

- Limited to one linked pair. You can build more than two portal pads, but you can only have a single active pair online. (More information on this reason below.)

- Pad cost (part 2).

If a player wants to build and link new pads over and over, to exploit a mechanic / bypass intended vanilla gameplay (such as warping straight from anywhere underground to their base, by initializing one pad above ground and building a second underground once they're ready), there's two downsides they must face.

For the former, glowstone is not a renewable resource, and doesn't always drop four dust upon breaking. This means the player will slowly run out with every new pad creation. (Constantly re-mining the obsidian will also take time.)

For the latter, the act of preparing all of the materials ahead of time / gathering the rest underground, and effectively leaving them all behind upon teleporting, is a significant trade-off. (Requirements + Time + Cost.) In this instance, a vanilla nether portal might even be better for this, as it only requires obsidian (found underground; unlike glowstone which must be prepared in advance).

You can use the portal pads however you wish.

You can build two and never link new ones again, build multiple and adjust the active link based on what you are doing, or pick up and move the same ones repeatedly.

For community-style multiplayer servers though, the main concept is for them to be a drop-in replacement for how traditional 'hub' nether portals operate.

Instead of having a nether portal directly at spawn, which leads to a bunch of highways to 'fast' travel to a particular person, players can build one of their pads somewhere nearby spawn (or perhaps beside each other's in an ever-increasing row), and build the other somewhere by their base.

This way, every player can use their personal pad to return to spawn, and then use anyone else's spawn pad to visit their base. Once done, they simply do the opposite to return home.