Gateway Intents

Discord only sends events your bot explicitly requests through Gateway Intents. Missing an intent means missing the corresponding events. This is one of the most common sources of bot bugs.

Default intents

The generated scaffold starts with the minimum intent for slash command bots:

src/bight.ts

import { GatewayIntentBits } from "discord.js";

// Inside client options
intents: [GatewayIntentBits.Guilds]

Guilds covers guild join/leave events and the baseline data needed for slash commands.

Expanding intents

Add intents in src/bight.ts when you need access to additional event types:

Feature	Required intents	Privileged?
Prefix commands	GuildMessages, MessageContent	MessageContent is privileged
Message commands	GuildMessages, MessageContent	MessageContent is privileged
Voice state tracking	GuildVoiceStates	No
Member join/leave events	GuildMembers	Yes
Presence updates	GuildPresences	Yes

Privileged intents must also be enabled in the Discord Developer Portal under your bot’s settings. Enabling them in code alone is not enough.

Keeping intents centralized

All intent configuration lives in src/bight.ts. This makes the bot’s event surface visible from one file, so there’s no need to search the codebase to understand what data the bot receives from Discord.