Notes

Finding A Lost Minecraft Base - Edunham

I manage a small, mostly-vanilla Minecraft server. I was there playing with friends at an isolated location in the middle of nowhere earlier in the day. I slept in a basic bed, hoping that it would be enough to get me back later.



After returning to spawn, installing the warp plugin (and learning about Essentials) and rebooting the server, and then teleporting to other coordinates to install their warps, I tried to kill my avatar in order to return it back to its bed. It woke up at spawn, instead of returning to its bed. My friends had signed off for the night, so I couldn't just teleport there. And I didn't record the base's coordinates. What can I do to get them back?



A little digging in the documentation revealed that there is no console command that could give a server to reveal the last-viewed location or bed location of an arbitrary player to an admin. The server should have information about players as it will usually recall their beds when they return to play.



There is a directory world/playerdata/ on the server that contains one file per player the server has ever seen. The file names are the players UUIDs which can be copied into this tool to turn them into usernames. I decided to avoid the tool because the last modified timestamps indicated which files belonged to friends who were at our base. i do what the voices in my head tell me So I downloaded an .dat file which appeared to correspond to a player whose location or bed would be of interest to me. The file was compressed by a running file on it. However the process of unzipping it and then looking for any strings to make it more readable yielded no results.



The site reminded me that .dat was NBT-encoded. The recommended NBT Explorer tool appeared to require a variety of Mono runtime stuff to be compatible with Linux and I downloaded a program that claimed to be an NBT wrapper for Python to see if it could be useful.


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