namewall2

Locating A Lost Minecraft Base - Edunham

I manage a small, mostly-vanilla Minecraft server. I was there playing with friends in an uninhabited location in the middle of nowhere earlier in the day. I slept on a bed at the base, thinking that would be enough to bring me back again later.

After returning to spawn, installing a warp plugin (and discovering that /warp is from Essentials) and rebooting the server, and teleporting to another coordinate to install their warps, I tried killing my avatar in order to return it to its bed. Instead of getting up from bed, it returned to the spawn point. My friends had signed off for the night so I wasn't able to teleport to the base. Wikimedia I also hadn't recorded the location of the base. How could I get back?

A quick look through the docs revealed there is no console command that can give a server the last seen place or the bed of any player to an admin. However, the server must know something about the players since it will usually keep track of where their beds were before they return to the game.

There is a directory world/playerdataon the server, which includes one file for each player the server has seen. Be Yourself; Everyone Else Is Already Taken These are the player UUIDs. You can copy them into this tool to create usernames. However, I did not use the program, as the most recent timestamps on the files indicated which two belonged to the friends who were both at our base. I copied a.dat file that seemed to be related to a person's location or bed location. A running program on the file indicated that it was gzipped, however, unzipping it and examining the result for anything relevant with strings produced nothing that was understandable.

The wiki reminded me that the .dat was encoded with NBT. The recommended NBT Explorer tool appeared to require a bunch of Mono runtime components to work with Linux, so instead I grabbed some code that claimed to be a Python NBT wrapper to see if it could provide any useful information.