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.

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
Integer	4	-2147483648 to 2147483647
Long	8
MAGIC	16	0x00ffff00fefefefefdfdfdfd12345678	always those hex bytes, corresponding to RakNet's default OFFLINE_MESSAGE_DATA_ID
string	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{|}~

Reference

RakNet datagram and message header information: http://www.raknet.net/raknet/manual/systemoverview.html

The latest version of the protocol is not fully documented yet, but 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