Locator Bar

Minecraft Locator Bar Colors: All 16 Names and Custom Hex

Every Minecraft Locator Bar color: the 16 named colors with hex values, custom hex via /waypoint, and where each player's default color comes from.

最近更新: 2026-07-23

The Locator Bar arrived with Java Edition 1.21.6 on 17 June 2025, sitting where the experience bar normally is and showing other players as colored dots. The colors are not decoration — they are the only thing distinguishing one dot from another. This page covers where each color comes from, the full list of names the game accepts, how to set a custom hex value, and what to do when two people on your server end up looking the same.

Three sources of color, in order of precedence

A waypoint's color comes from exactly one of three places. Later entries win.

1. The entity's UUID (the default). The Minecraft Wiki states it directly: in Java Edition "the color of a waypoint is assigned to an entity based on its UUID." This is deterministic — the same UUID always produces the same color, on every server, forever. Notch's UUID, for instance, always yields #DC5D7F. The exact arithmetic, including the 0.9 shading factor the client applies, is worked through step by step in how Minecraft UUID color is calculated, and the color finder will compute it for any name or UUID you give it.

2. Team color. If the entity is on a scoreboard team that has a color, the waypoint takes the team color instead of the UUID default. This is the cheapest way to make a whole faction read as one color.

3. An explicit /waypoint color. A command-set color overrides both of the above until it is reset.

The 16 named colors

The /waypoint command accepts what the Wiki calls "one of the 16 color codes" — the same set Minecraft uses for chat formatting everywhere else. The Wiki's own source note confirms it, pointing at the game's Waypoint#Icon class taking its color from the ChatFormatting enum.

These are the names, with the hex values the Java Edition client renders them as:

  • black — #000000
  • dark_blue — #0000AA
  • dark_green — #00AA00
  • dark_aqua — #00AAAA
  • dark_red — #AA0000
  • dark_purple — #AA00AA
  • gold — #FFAA00
  • gray — #AAAAAA
  • dark_gray — #555555
  • blue — #5555FF
  • green — #55FF55
  • aqua — #55FFFF
  • red — #FF5555
  • light_purple — #FF55FF
  • yellow — #FFFF55
  • white — #FFFFFF

A few naming traps worth internalising before you type a command:

  • light_purple is the pink one. There is no pink.
  • gold is the orange one. There is no orange.
  • aqua is cyan. There is no cyan.
  • blue is the light blue; dark_blue is the navy. The same inversion applies to green/dark_green and red/dark_red — the undecorated name is always the brighter one.
  • These are not the dye or wool color names. light_blue, magenta, lime and brown are dye colors and will be rejected here.

black deserves a warning of its own: it renders as #000000 against a dark HUD and is close to invisible in most lighting. It is legal, and it is almost never what you want.

Setting a named color

/waypoint modify <waypoint> color <color>

Working example from the Wiki:

/waypoint modify Steve color gold

The <waypoint> argument is the entity whose marker you are changing — a player name, a UUID, or a target selector that resolves to exactly one entity. A selector matching several entities fails, so limit=1 is usually required:

/waypoint modify @e[type=creeper,limit=1] color red
/waypoint modify @s color aqua

Setting a custom hex color

/waypoint modify <waypoint> color hex <hex_color>

The argument is a 6-digit RRGGBB value in the range 000000–FFFFFF, with no leading #. That omission is the most common reason the command fails to parse.

/waypoint modify @s color hex FF0000
/waypoint modify Steve color hex 6495ED
/waypoint modify @e[type=creeper,limit=1] color hex 00FF00

6495ED is cornflower blue, the Wiki's own example. Hex gives you the full 16.7 million values rather than 16, which is the practical way to give a large group distinguishable markers — the waypoint command generator will pick spread-out values and write the commands.

One important difference from the named colors: a hex value is applied literally. The 0.9 shading that the client applies when deriving a color from a UUID is part of the derivation, not part of the rendering, so hex DC5D7F gives you exactly #DC5D7F.

Resetting to default

/waypoint modify <waypoint> color reset

This drops the override. For a player, that means falling back to the team color if they have one, otherwise the UUID-derived default.

Listing what is being tracked

/waypoint list

Lists every tracked waypoint, showing the player's name or the entity's type in that waypoint's color. Note the Wiki's caveat: entities with no explicitly set color are printed white in this list "regardless of the randomly chosen color by the game or their team color." The list is not a way to read defaults — use the finder for that.

Requirements and limits

  • Permission level 2 and cheats enabled. /waypoint is an operator command. Nothing here works on a vanilla server where you are not an op.
  • Only living entities can transmit. The Wiki is specific: waypoint transmitters "only include living entities, which are armor stands, mobs, and players." A dropped item or a minecart cannot carry a waypoint.
  • The entity must actually be transmitting. Either its waypoint_transmit_range attribute is above zero — which it is for players by default, at 60,000,000 — or you have explicitly set its color this session.
  • Command-set tracking is temporary. Setting a color on a mob makes it tracked, but per the Wiki that tracking "is temporary and it is no longer tracked after reloading the world," and is also lost when the entity despawns or the player leaves the world. For a persistent mob marker, raise waypoint_transmit_range instead of relying on the color command.

Two attributes govern the geometry:

  • waypoint_transmit_range — how far this entity's waypoint reaches. Applies to players and other entities.
  • waypoint_receive_range — how far this player can see waypoints. Players only. Set it to zero and the player receives no waypoint information at all.

Turning the bar on and off

In Java Edition the bar is controlled by a game rule, and the name has moved twice — which is why half the guides online give a name the game rejects:

  • Snapshot 25w15a (1.21.6, experimental): added as useLocatorBar.
  • Snapshot 25w17a (1.21.6, released): renamed to locatorBar, and available without the experimental data pack.
  • Snapshot 25w44a (1.21.11 development): every game rule was moved into a registry and renamed to a snake_case resource location, making it locator_bar.

So on 1.21.6 through 1.21.10 use /gamerule locatorBar false; on 1.21.11 and later use /gamerule locator_bar false. It defaults to true.

Bedrock Edition uses a setting rather than a game rule: "Player waypoints" (playerwaypoints), set to either "Everyone" (the default) or "Off". It replaced the older locatorbar game rule in Preview 26.30.20.

Hiding from the bar without turning it off

Per the Wiki, a player disappears from everyone else's Locator Bar by:

  • sneaking (crouching),
  • wearing a mob head,
  • wearing a carved pumpkin,
  • being under the Invisibility effect.

Players in Spectator mode are only visible to other spectators.

Bedrock Edition colors are not the same thing

This is the caveat that undoes most cross-platform advice. In Bedrock Edition, per the same Wiki page, "the color is randomly assigned to the player at every session."

Not derived from anything, not stable between sessions, and not settable — Bedrock has no /waypoint command. There is no color to look up for a Bedrock player, because there is nothing persistent to look up. Bedrock also tracks only players in multiplayer; other entities are not tracked at all.

Everything else on this page is Java Edition only.

Shape as well as color

Color is not the only signal on the bar. The icon changes with distance, which gives you a second channel of information:

  • 0–179 blocks: square
  • 179–230 blocks: circle
  • 230–281 blocks: small square
  • 281+ blocks: small circle

If a waypoint is above or below your camera pitch, a pointer appears on the indicator showing the vertical direction.

Java Edition also lets a resource pack define waypoint styles in a waypoint_style directory, applied with:

/waypoint modify <waypoint> style set <style>
/waypoint modify <waypoint> style reset

The default is minecraft:default. The game does not validate that the style exists — point it at nothing and you get a missing-texture icon. There is one unused icon shipped in the game files, bowtie, reachable with /waypoint modify <target> style set bowtie.

The color and style are stored on living entities in a locator_bar_icon NBT compound, holding a color integer (a 32-bit signed value, treated as fully opaque) and a style string.

Choosing colors that actually work

The bar is thin, the dots are small, and you are usually reading them mid-fight. Practical rules:

Avoid the dark end. black, dark_blue, dark_gray and dark_red all sit close to the HUD background. On a bright sky or a snow biome they are fine; in a cave they vanish.

Spread hue, not lightness. Two colors that differ only in brightness — red and dark_red, blue and dark_blue — read as the same dot at a glance. Pick from opposite sides of the wheel: red, aqua, yellow, light_purple is a much stronger set of four than red, gold, yellow, dark_red.

Sixteen names is not enough for a big group, and defaults are worse than you think. Random UUID-derived colors collide visually far more often than they collide exactly. On our own simulation, an eight-player party has roughly a two-in-three chance that at least one pair is hard to tell apart, and by sixteen players it is near-certain. Check before the raid, not during it: the Locator Bar color checker takes a list of players and flags the confusable pairs.

Fix it once with commands, not every session. Run the whole party through the waypoint command generator and paste the block into a function or a command block. Colors set this way survive as long as nothing resets them.

Reserve a color for a role. Healer always green, scout always yellow. Consistency beats prettiness — you stop reading the color and start recognising it.

Related pages

References