Pocket Edition Protocol Documentation
This is the (unofficial) protocol docs for Minecraft: PE. The protocol currently uses UDP for communication, different from PC (TCP). The usual UDP issues are still here (lost packets, wrong order, etc.), but the protocol solves a few of those problems using special packet encapsulation, based on TCP. The Minecraft: PE client uses RakNet for it's networking library. Even though it uses RakNet, you can still write software without the library. Currently, the game's default port is 19132. It is recommended to use this when possible because processes such as server discovering will not work otherwise.
Data Types
Minecraft packets use different data types to communicate with each other. The documented ones are listed below:
| Size | Range | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| byte | 1 | -128 to 127 | |
| short | 2 | -32768 to 32767 | |
| int | 4 | -2147483648 to 2147483647 | |
| long | 8 | | |
| MAGIC | 16 | 0x00ffff00fefefefefdfdfdfd12345678
|
always those hex bytes, corresponding to RakNet's default OFFLINE_MESSAGE_DATA_ID |
| string | unsigned short + string | N/A | Prefixed by a short containing the length of the string in characters. It appears that only the following ASCII characters can be displayed: !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ |
Packet format
All packet's in Minecraft: Pocket Edition start with their ID, which is an unsigned byte. If you are using a language which does not support unsigned types such as Java, you can do (byte & 0xFF) to get the unsigned version.
References
RakNet datagram and message header information: http://jenkinssoftware.com/raknet/manual/systemoverview.html
The latest version of the protocol is not fully documented yet, but all of the packets can be found in the Dragonet server code https://github.com/DragonetMC/Dragonet/tree/master/src/main/java/org/dragonet/net/packet Protocol Version: 23 (MCPE 0.11.0b6)
The older protocol specification(ver <= 0.10.x): There is also an automatically generated specification of many of the packages can be found in the MiNET server code https://github.com/NiclasOlofsson/MiNET/blob/master/src/MiNET/MiNET/Net/MCPE%20Protocol%20Documentation.md
The MiNET wiki also contain development notes around some functionality https://github.com/NiclasOlofsson/MiNET/wiki These will be migrated to this wiki in due time.
