How the stats work

Where the numbers come from

A small program we call the collector runs on the machine the worlds run on. About once a minute it reads each world's files: the stats file Minecraft keeps for every player, the team data, and the playtime record our Discord bot keeps. It asks each server one thing, the list command, to see who's online, and it can't send any other command.

It writes everything into one file, and this site reads that file and nothing else. The site has no access to the game or its folders. If the collector stops, the figures stop moving, and the bottom of every page says how old they are.

How often

About once a minute, for each of the three worlds

What it reads

Player stats, team data, the bot's playtime record and ladders

What it asks each server

list, and nothing else

What it can change

Nothing

Ticks, centimetres and zeros

Minecraft keeps time in ticks, 20 to a second, and distance in centimetres. We turn them into hours and kilometres before you see them, so a 100,000 in the file is 1 km on your profile.

Minecraft also doesn't write a stat until it's above 0. A player who has never killed anyone has no “player kills” line in their file at all, so a missing line isn't shown as a measured 0. When we couldn't read a figure at all, the page says unknown instead.

How the ladders work

There are 42 ladders in five families: Movement, Combat, Mining, Crafts and Misfortune. Each one counts a single thing, like kilometres walked or deaths taken, and our Discord bot keeps them, the same bot that hands out the badges.

• You appear on ladders once you've played two hours.
• You're on a ladder when your figure for it is above 0.
• The bot keeps the top 60 of each ladder, so your place shows on your profile anywhere in that range.
• When somebody passes somebody near the top, the Discord says so, with both names.
• Every world has its own ladders. Hours on two different packs aren't the same thing, so they're never added together.

Hours come from the bot's playtime record rather than from Minecraft, because the bot also counts sessions and streaks. Both are matched to your account by your Minecraft UUID, so a name change doesn't split your history in two.

The item index

Items adds up what everyone has mined, crafted, used, picked up, dropped, broken and killed. For each member and each of those lists, the collector keeps the 50 biggest entries, so the per-item figures are the sum of those. The totals at the top of each list are complete: they're added up from the full files before anything is cut.

The wiki

The wiki is read out of the pack's own files: every mod's jar, plus Minecraft's own server jar. That's why it shows recipes the way the worlds have them, including the ones mods have changed or replaced.

What runs beside the worlds

Four small programs, each with one job. The collector reads the stats, as above. One keeps each world's whitelist in step with who has access, once a minute, and it can only remove a name it added itself. One follows each world's log and posts chat, joins and advancements to Discord, without a mod in the game. One renders the builds members capture, for the gallery.

Only the whitelist one can change anything on a game server, and only those names.