Your first zone

A zone is a circle on the map. While it runs, everyone standing inside it is hidden from everyone else inside it. Nothing happens outside the circle.

You define a zone once, then start and stop it as often as you like. Let’s make one around an arena.

Create it and run it

Stand where you want the middle of the zone.

The centre of the circle will be your feet.
Create it.
```
/sh create arena 150
```
That is a zone called arena, with a radius of 150 blocks. It is written to zones.yml immediately, but nothing happens yet: a zone is created stopped.
Start it.
```
/sh start arena
```
Players inside the circle now see each other under a false name and skin.
See it for yourself.

You will not see anything change on your own screen, because nobody is ever disguised to themselves. Get a second player inside the circle, or connect a second account.
Stop it.
```
/sh stop arena
```

Creating a zone from the console

The command works from the console too, but there it has nowhere to take the position from, so give it the coordinates and the world:

/sh create arena 150 1500 1500 events

The order is: id, radius, x, z, world.

What you just made

The zone	Behaviour
Shape	A circle of 150 blocks around the point you stood on.
Height	No limit. Someone at bedrock and someone in the sky are both inside, if their x and z are in the circle.
Names	Random, from the `default` pool.
Who sees through it	Nobody, except staff using `/sh bypass`.
Duration	Until you stop it, or two hours, whichever comes first.

That two hour limit is default_max_duration in config.yml. It exists so a zone someone forgot to stop does not stay up all night. Give the zone its own max_duration, or start it with an explicit time, to change it:

/sh start arena 20m

Looking at what is running

/sh list

lists every zone you have defined and marks the ones currently running.

/sh info arena

shows one zone in detail: where it is, how long it has left, how many players are inside, and the rules that apply to it. Run it whenever a zone does not behave the way you expected. It is the fastest way to see what SomaHider actually read from your file.

Making it useful

Right now your zone hides everyone from everyone, with random names, and someone has to type /sh start for it to happen. Three things usually come next:

You want	Read
The zone to start by itself when your event does	Starting a zone from a chat message
The zone to run at the same hours every week	Running a zone on a weekly schedule
Teammates to still recognise each other	Letting some players recognise each other

And if random names are not the look you are after, changing how hidden players look covers names, skins, hearts and armour.