Player Skulls Not Loading for Offline Players on PaperMC (Works on Spigot)

[AkotoWeed]

Expected behavior

The expected behavior is that player skulls load correctly, even when the player is offline, displaying the correct texture or appearance as they do in Spigot.

Observed/Actual behavior

The player skulls do not load when the player is offline, showing either a blank texture or failing to appear altogether.

Steps/models to reproduce

1. Set up a PaperMC server with the latest version.
2. Ensure a player has placed a skull (player head) of another player on the server.
3. Make sure the player whose skull is being used is offline.
4. Attempt to display the skull.
5. Observe that the skull either appears blank or does not load at all.
6. Repeat the test on a Spigot server, where the skull loads correctly.

Plugin and Datapack List

none

Paper version

This server is running Paper version 1.21.4-66-main@d00344a (2024-12-29T14:59:35Z) (Implementing API version 1.21.4-R0.1-SNAPSHOT)\nYou are running the latest version\nPrevious version: 1.21.4-60-0629524 (MC: 1.21.4)

Other

• The issue occurs with the same PaperMC version on multiple local servers but works inconsistently on some remote servers.
• We have tested this with multiple players and different setups, and the problem persists on PaperMC but not on Spigot.
• A friend of mine attempted to fix this issue through a pull request but found the PaperMC code too complicated to resolve the problem.
• The issue started happening after an unknown major version update of PaperMC.
• The problem does not affect all servers, suggesting the issue may be configuration or environment-dependent.

[x9nico]

Hey!
I made a test on my side, I don't have any problem with the skull of offline players :

How did you generated the skull ? From /give ?

There is the command that I've done to get it :

/give x9nico minecraft:player_head[minecraft:profile={name:"JumperBoost"}]

[AkotoWeed]

User not found.

[x9nico]

User not found.

I made another test (user Likaos), the skull is not the good :

It looks like that sometimes, the texture is not the good one.

Original texture (the item) :

My command again :

/give x9nico minecraft:player_head[minecraft:profile="Likaos"]

[masmc05]

Are you sure you have online mode enabled?

[x9nico]

Are you sure you have online mode enabled?

Oh yes it's disabled, maybe it's for that, my bad sorry.

[AkotoWeed]

Online mode is enabled yes, me and my friends we all tried it in localhost, there it doesnt work but on our public server it does work

[electronicboy]

How are you creating the skulls? The only behavioral change vs spigot that I'm aware of is that we use mojangs ItemStacks for everything, which makes a spigot change more likely to result in profiles on skulls not applying properly due to a race condition they induced

[NonSwag]

I noticed that on my servers too
I think that happened from 1.20.4 to .6
Personally I fixed that by completing the profile and then applying the player profile to the skull
I believed that was just the new profile component requiring the entire data to properly display the head
That also happened to placed heads in the world but you guys fixed that (don't exactly remember how tho)

Edit: I recently made the transition to the component API and this issue does not exist anymore (only when using item meta)