This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by mateusriff
Can Minecraft serve as a powerful platform to generate useful data? This is the question I've been occasionally pondering for the past few months. I've been tapping into the player's in-game inventories and actions, logging them to databases and exploring the resulting data. I'm particularly interested in getting a feel for the economy of a Minecraft world from said data. The results I've been getting are quite interesting and I'd like to share them here, along with my methods.
On my latest experiment, I logged the player's experience gains along with some metadata to a time-series database during a gameplay session. I later queried the database and plotted the data to make some interesting visualizations and get my point across.
The rationale behind logging experience gains comes from a hunch I had, that experience points might serve as a proxy for in-game economic activity. After all, whenever a player mines coal, smelts iron ore into ingots, fights mobs, etc., they gain experience — and these are all economic activities in essence.
I did this using a Minecraft plugin I built myself for a Paper server running on my local machine. The plugin itself is quite simple, consisting of three basic components: (1) an event listener, which listens to an event triggered whenever the player's experience points change; (2) a cache where player experience gains are temporarily stored; and (3) a database client that flushes the cache to InfluxDB every 60 seconds. I went with a time-series database because the data I was working with was fundamentally time-bound. You can check out the plugin's full code, along with the InfluxDB compose file, here.
So, what were my results after playing by myself on my local server for a about 1 hour and 30 minutes? Below, you can see the first plot I made, showing cumulative experience gain over time.
As you can see, gains happened in bursts and were followed by periods of little-to-no gains. This correlates with my activity during the session: the bursts happened whenever I mined, fought off mobs, and smelt materials for the home I was building. The occasional freezes in experience gains happened when I was exploring or actually building the house itself once I had the materials.
Remember the metadata I said I saved along with the experience gains? It included the chunk where the player was when those gains happened. Below, use your imagination to picture a top-down view of a Minecraft world underneath the grid formed by the heatmap. Each square on the grid represents a chunk of the game's world. The lighter the color, the most experience gains happened there.
As expected, the chunk where the most activity happened was the chunk where I was building my home and constantly smelting materials, with a total of 49 experience points gained on it. You can see some activity too in the lower left quadrant of the grid, where there were some caves I mined.
If we add time as another dimension to the heatmap above, we can actually see when gains happened in each chunk as a function of time!
There's a story being told there. I started in the lower left quadrant, mining. Then, moved to the upper right quadrant, where I decided to build my home. I moved back and forth between my home and the mines as I needed more materials to build it.
I can only imagine how cool it would be to collect this sort of data on a server with dozens or even hundreds of players. That's definitely on my to-do list! But before, I want to implement a slighty different approach, from which I believe I could mine data to answer even more interesting questions and tell more detailed stories — follow me if you want to see what's coming up next.
Although it's in-game economics I'm interested at, approaches like this can be used to mine data out of Minecraft for all sorts of purposes. With Minecraft being an easily extensible sandbox game, our imagination is the limit here!
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by mateusriff
mateusriff | Sciencx (2025-08-27T03:07:58+00:00) Mining Data Out of Minecraft. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/08/27/mining-data-out-of-minecraft-2/
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