Locator Bar

Locator Bar Color Checker

Add everyone on your server and see their markers side by side on a simulated bar — plus a straight answer on which pairs you will not be able to tell apart in game.

No players yet

Add two or more players to see their markers compared.

What the locator bar color checker is comparing

Every marker on the Java Edition Locator Bar is colored from the entity's UUID, not from a palette the server hands out. This locator bar color checker resolves each name you add to its UUID, runs the same hash the client runs, then compares the results against each other.

The derivation in one paragraph: java.util.UUID.hashCode() XORs the UUID's two 64-bit halves together, then XORs the top and bottom halves of that value into one signed 32-bit integer; the low three bytes become red, green and blue; every channel is multiplied by 0.9 before the marker is drawn. No randomness, no server state, no lookup table. The full derivation is written out step by step if you want to reproduce it yourself.

Comparison is the part a single lookup cannot give you. Two hex values that differ on paper can be indistinguishable on a marker a few pixels wide, so this page measures the distance between every pair of colors in your party and flags the ones that are too close to call. Twelve players is sixty-six pairs — not something you want to eyeball.

Why teammates end up with the same color

Twenty-four bits gives 16,777,216 possible colors, which sounds like far more than any party needs. Two things eat that number in practice.

  • You are comparing dots, not hex codes.

    A marker is a small icon read in peripheral vision while you are doing something else. Hundreds of thousands of those 16 million values collapse into “a greyish blue”, so the number of visually distinct outcomes is far smaller than the number of possible outcomes.

  • Pairs grow faster than players.

    A party of four has six pairs; a party of ten has forty-five. Each extra player raises the chance that some pair clashes much faster than people expect — the ordinary birthday-problem effect.

The 0.9 shade helps it along too, capping every channel at 229 instead of 255 and compressing the whole space toward black. None of this is a bug. The color was designed to be stable and free, not guaranteed unique, so planning for a collision is part of running a party.

Inputs that will not resolve

Names are resolved through Mojang's public profile API, so anything Mojang does not know about comes back empty. Three cases account for nearly all of them.

  • Offline-mode (cracked) servers.

    Those servers never ask Mojang; they compute a UUID from the name — version 3, the MD5 of OfflinePlayer:<username>. It is a real, stable UUID and it produces a real, stable color, but no API can hand it to you. Get it from the server and paste the UUID in instead of the name. Background: online versus offline Minecraft UUIDs.

  • Bedrock players.

    Bedrock has no Java UUID and does not derive colors from one. It assigns each player a color at random per session, so the color can differ every time they rejoin and nothing can predict it in advance. See the Bedrock Locator Bar for what Bedrock does offer.

  • Nicknames and recycled names.

    A chat nickname set by a plugin is not the account name, and the bar keys off the account UUID no matter what the nameplate says. Names can also be released and re-registered, so an old name may now resolve to a stranger. When in doubt, add the UUID.

Fixing a clash the checker finds

Once the locator bar color checker flags a pair, one of the two players needs an override. There are three things to know, all of them Java-side.

  • Override the waypoint color.

    /waypoint modify <target> color <name> takes one of the sixteen named colors, and color hex <RRGGBB> takes any six-digit value. Build either one for your version with the waypoint command generator, and undo it later with color reset.

  • Or use a team color.

    A player's team color overrides the UUID default on the bar, which is often the cleaner fix for a whole squad at once. How to change your Locator Bar color compares the routes side by side.

  • Mind the version.

    The Locator Bar arrived in Java Edition 1.21.6. From Java 26.2, color names must be lowercase with underscores — dark_purple is accepted, DarkPurple is not. The rule that turns the bar off was renamed from locatorBar to locator_bar in snapshot 25w44a (1.21.11); the Locator Bar gamerule page has the name for every version.

Party color questions

Can two players ever get exactly the same color?

Yes. Different UUIDs can hash into the same three bytes — nothing prevents it, it is simply unlikely. Visually confusable pairs are far more common than exact matches, which is why this locator bar color checker measures distance instead of testing for equality.

Will an override change the color for everyone?

Yes. The waypoint color lives on the entity rather than on each viewer's client, so every player sees the override once it is set.

Does every teammate have to run something?

No. /waypoint needs permission level 2 and cheats, and one operator can set colors on everybody's behalf. Checking colors on this page needs nothing at all.

Does it work for mobs and armor stands?

Only if you have their UUID. Any living entity that transmits a waypoint takes its color from the same hash, but mobs have no username to look up.

Why does the color look different in my screenshot?

The bar shades the marker and the icon sprite carries its own outline, so a color picked off a screenshot is usually a shade or two out. The value computed here is the one the client starts from; the unshaded original is shown by the Locator Bar color finder.