Skip to content
Spoor

Scent line

Through the goggles, the trail you are looking at shows a faint stream of drifting specks from each fresh step to the next.

Through the Tracker Goggles, the trail you are looking at shows a faint scent line: a stream of drifting pixel specks just above the ground.

Animated: a cow's trail at night through the goggles, with scent specks drifting from print to print.
The scent line on a cow's trail at night.

How it runs

Section titled “How it runs”
  • It runs from each fresh step to the next one, in a gentle arc that rises about 0.3 blocks, or less on short steps.
  • It links a step only to its own next step, and only if that step is within eight blocks. A missing step is never skipped over to a later print.
  • Any step without a linked next step, such as the newest step, or one whose next step is missing or more than eight blocks away, gets a short stream instead: it drifts two blocks ahead, the way the creature was going, and fades out.
  • It follows the trail the server recorded, across hops and drops, without checking the ground in between. Prints on ground that has changed are removed within a second anyway.
  • It shows only on the focused trail, the one you are looking at. See Choosing a trail.
  • It shows only through the goggles, in both Visible and Item mode. It vanishes the moment you take them off or look at another trail.

How it looks

Section titled “How it looks”
  • The specks take the trail’s category tint, very faint and lifted 40% toward white: amber for animals, coral for mobs, blue for players.
  • They glow at full block light, so they read as light rather than dirt, even at night.
  • They follow the print’s clarity: a worn print has a weaker line, and a crouched print half as strong. Your opacity setting scales them too, and they fade out toward the edge of your draw distance.
  • Prints older than one minute have no scent line. It is fresh scent only.

What it does not do

Section titled “What it does not do”

The scent line is a clue to the way the creature was going. It does not point to where the creature is now, and it does not find a route around obstacles. It does arc over blocks between two prints, or pass under a low ceiling, and it hides rather than cut through a block it cannot clear. If the creature’s next step was too far away to link, the line only drifts a couple of blocks the way it was going.