Movement

How a creature moves changes the trail it leaves. Through the goggles, the last part of each reading names the gait: Walking, Running or Landed. Without goggles, the spacing and the marks themselves still give it away.

Walking

Footprints are spaced by body size: about 0.45 times the larger of the creature’s height and width. For a player that is about 0.8 blocks. Big creatures stride farther, small ones leave closer prints.

The gap is never shorter than the creature’s largest foot plus 0.05 blocks, so its consecutive prints never touch, and never longer than four blocks. A server can stretch or shrink every gap with strideScale. See Configuration.

Running

Running spreads the prints 1.6 times farther apart than walking.

• A player is running while sprinting.
• Other creatures count as running when their actual speed passes a threshold above their usual walking speed. Speed is measured from how they really moved, never predicted from settings.

The reading says Running for these prints.

Crouching

Crouching leaves shorter, lighter prints: steps 0.7 times as far apart (but never closer than the foot limit), drawn at half the shading and half the opacity. They wear away twice as fast, four times in rain, and are gone at half the dry lifetime: about five minutes at the default setting. A careful sneak is harder to follow, but crouched prints are still recorded and you can still follow them.

Players crouch by sneaking. Any creature that reports crouching counts too: in vanilla Minecraft that means foxes while they stalk.

Landing

Fall two blocks or more, landing within eight blocks of where you jumped, and you leave a landing mark: every foot at once, with 1.5 times the usual shading. The reading says Landed. Ordinary hops leave no landing mark.

Gliding, climbing and slow falling are not falls. Only the free fall after them is measured, and a landing while slow falling leaves no mark.

Hops, step-ups and drops

A hop, a step-up or a drop keeps the same trail, so the scent line carries on across it, as long as it ends within eight blocks of where you jumped, measured across the ground. The height of a drop has no limit of its own, so a tall straight drop still keeps the trail. It must land within 100 ticks (five seconds), without flying and without moving more than four blocks in a single tick. The ground is checked on each side of the jump, never across it. A jump that lands farther away, or stays in the air longer, starts a new stretch of trail.

These break a trail:

• swimming and riding
• teleporting: any move of more than eight blocks along the ground counts as one
• crossing hard or unsupported ground, where no prints can be made