About Locator Bar

Locator Bar is a small, free set of tools for one narrow Minecraft mechanic: the Locator Bar that Java Edition added in 1.21.6, and the waypoint colors that go with it. Three tools — a color finder, a color checker, and a /waypoint command generator — plus a set of guides covering the rest of the mechanic.

Why this site exists

The Locator Bar assigns every player a color automatically, and that color is not shown anywhere in the game. If two people on a server end up with markers that look alike, there is no in-game screen that tells you so, and no in-game way to preview what a color change would look like before you type the command.

That is a small problem, but it is a real one, and the answers were scattered: some on the wiki, some in snapshot changelogs, some only in decompiled source. This site puts them in one place and makes the color part computable.

How the color figures are produced

Every color on this site is computed in your browser from the player's UUID. Nothing is looked up from a database of pre-computed answers, and no color is guessed.

The derivation is: take Java's UUID.hashCode() — mostSigBits ^ leastSigBits, then the high 32 bits XOR the low 32 bits — keep the low three bytes of the result as red, green and blue, then multiply each channel by 0.9.

This arithmetic is not documented by Mojang. The wiki states that a waypoint's color is derived from the entity's UUID, but not how. The steps above are reverse-engineered: they reproduce what the client actually draws, and they are checked against a known result — Notch's UUID (069a79f4-44e9-4726-a5be-fca90e38aaf5) produces #DC5D7F, which matches the in-game color. That is evidence, not a specification. If Mojang changes the shading factor in a future version, these tools will be wrong until we notice and update them. The UUID color guide shows the whole derivation so you can check it yourself rather than taking our word for it.

What we source, and what we flag

The guides cite primary sources — the Minecraft Wiki, Mojang's own snapshot and release changelogs — and link them at the foot of each page. Where something is genuinely undocumented, the page says so instead of filling the gap with a confident guess. Three examples of things currently marked as unverified:

• Whether a player in another dimension appears on your Locator Bar. Community consensus says no; we found no official statement either way.
• The exact color arithmetic, as described above.
• Whether renaming a Minecraft account can ever change its UUID. The practical answer is no, but we could not find one official page stating it outright.

Version details matter here more than usual, because this mechanic has moved: the game rule was useLocatorBar, then locatorBar, and is locator_bar from Java 1.21.11 onward. Guidance written for one version fails on another, so the guides name the version each instruction applies to.

Username lookups

The finder, checker and generator accept a Java Edition username as well as a UUID. Usernames are resolved through Mojang's public profile API. The request passes through this site only because Mojang's API sends no CORS headers, so a browser cannot call it directly; we store nothing from it.

Who runs it

An independent developer, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Mojang Studios or Microsoft. "Minecraft" is a trademark of Mojang Studios; this site is an unofficial fan resource.

Corrections

If something here is wrong — and on a mechanic this new, some of it will be — tell us and it gets fixed. Version-specific corrections are especially welcome, as is anything where we have marked a fact unverified and you have a primary source that settles it.

Email: contact@locatorbar.com