Minecraft Data Pack Programming: Scoreboard Usage

Please note: this guide specifically covers the Java Edition version of Minecraft. Bedrock Edition does not use data packs, but provides customization through add-ons.

The data packs built in this series can be found in the playfulprogramming/mc-datapacks-tutorial repository. Feel free to use it for reference as you read through these articles!

Previously, this series has covered the structure of a data pack, conditional statements, and other command syntax. This article will build on top of that to cover scoreboards, which allows us to keep track of player information and store variables in our programs.

Storing scores

In many data packs, you might find a need to store information that can't be directly accessed through an entity or another command. A common way to do this is through the use of scoreboards, which can store a table of numbers for each entity or player. These can be used to reference player statistics, such as the number of blocks mined, or keep track of arbitrary values in your code.

Creating a scoreboard

We can use the subcommands of /scoreboard objectives to create and modify scoreboards in a world. Let's try making a scoreboard to track the number of animals that each player has spawned through our data pack.

scoreboard objectives add fennifith.animals_spawned dummy

This creates an objective named fennifith.animals_spawned that is connected to the dummy game statistic. We'll talk about other statistics later on, but the dummy statistic effectively means the scoreboard will only be modified if you set its values yourself.

What is an objective?

The naming of "objective" and "scoreboard" can be a point of confusion. In this article, for simplicity's sake, they can be considered as two names for the same thing — even though they might have slightly different meanings.

Generally speaking, an "objective" is a relation between a set of scores and a statistic. Here, the objective name is fennifith.animals_spawned and the statistic is dummy. The objective contains its scores for each player in the form of a scoreboard.

Scoreboard conventions

Namespaced objective names

Players often want to have multiple data packs installed in their world at once. Since all scoreboards operate globally in the world, we need to make sure that our scoreboard names will not conflict with any scoreboards used by other data packs.

For example, what might happen if two data packs want to track different blocks that the player has mined? The first might create a scoreboard for blocksMined that tracks stone, while the second might use blocksMined to track dirt. However, both data packs will be referencing the same blocksMined scoreboard in the world, which could end up tracking both stone and dirt, mixing up the behavior of both. We need a way to separate the scores of these data packs and prevent them from conflicting with each other.

To accomplish this, it is common to "namespace" the scoreboard names within your data pack by adding a certain prefix. Here, I've started my scoreboard names with fennifith.animals to indicate that they belong to my data pack.

Creating & removing scoreboards

Typically, you'll want to create any scoreboards you need in a load.mcfunction function, connected to the #minecraft:load function tag.

Some data packs additionally create an uninstall.mcfunction file, not connected to any function tag, that can be executed to remove all of the data pack's scoreboard objectives. This is useful for when a player wants to remove your data pack from their world without leaving any of its behavior behind.

Setting values

We can set values of a scoreboard using the /scoreboard players subcommands. Most of these subcommands accept two arguments for the <selector> and <objective> of the score to change. For example, the following command will set our entry in the fennifith.animals_spawned table to 1.

#                  set our scoreboard entry#                  |   use the entry of the current player ("fennifith")#                  |   |  modify the scoreboard named "fennifith.animals_spawned"#                  |   |  |                         set "1" as the value of this entry#                  |   |  |                         |scoreboard players set @s fennifith.animals_spawned 1

If we want to add to this value, we can use the scoreboard players add subcommand instead. Likewise, scoreboard players remove will subtract a value from our scoreboard.

#                  add a number to the current scoreboard value#                  |   use the entry of the current player#                  |   |                    use "2" as the number to add#                  |   |                    |scoreboard players add @s fennifith.animals_spawned 2

Note

Be wary of the difference between /scoreboard objectives add and /scoreboard players add, as they are easy to confuse — I even mixed them up a few times while writing this article! The objectives subcommands are used exclusively for creating or removing entire scoreboards, while the players subcommands can modify specific entries in existing scoreboards to change their values.

objectives add is saying to "add a new scoreboard", while players add is increasing the value of a scoreboard entry by a given number.

Using global entries

In certain cases, we want to store values that aren't player specific, but instead affect our entire data pack. For example, we might want to track the total number of animals spawned in our world in addition to the number of animals for each player.

We can do this by referencing a nonexistent player. The scoreboard will include an entry for any entity or name, regardless of whether it actually exists in our world — so by using a name that will never exist, we can reference it globally from anywhere in our code.

scoreboard players set $global fennifith.animals_spawned 4

This trick works because $ is not a character that Minecraft players can register in their username. As such, we can ensure that the $global entry will never be used by any actual player or entity in the world.

If we didn't include the $ before our variable name in this snippet, our code would still work! However, what would happen if a player registered the username global and tried to use our data pack? Their score would use the same entry as our global variable, and both would attempt to store their values in the same place — causing any logic we write to appear broken.

Since the $ is an invalid username character, we can safely use it for global values without that possibility.

Using the "/execute store" subcommand

Each Minecraft command provides a "success" and a "result" value which specify if the command was successful — and if so, what value it returned.

The execute store subcommand can be used to designate a place to store these values, such as a scoreboard entry.

For example, this command will copy the value of our $global variable into $global_2...

#       store the result of the command#       |                  place it in "$global_2"#       |                  |                                       run a command that returns the value of "$global"#       |                  |                                       |execute store result score $global_2 fennifith.animals_spawned run scoreboard players get $global fennifith.animals_spawned

While this example will successfully copy our $global variable to $global_2, there is somewhat shorter way to achieve that using scoreboard operations...

It might not always be obvious what value a command returns as its "result", as this is sometimes different from what it prints in the game chat. However, all commands can be looked up on the Minecraft wiki to see what values and behavior they should provide.

Scoreboard operations

If we want to set a scoreboard value based on another entry, we can use the scoreboard players operation subcommand to specify a conceptual state of existence between the two values.

For example, to make our $global entry in the previous examples equal to the fennifith entry, we can use the following command:

#                            write the result *to* the $global entry#                            |                                 set the scoreboards equal to each other#                            |                                 | get the value *from* @s#                            |                                 | |scoreboard players operation $global fennifith.animals_spawned = @s fennifith.animals_spawned

Math operations

We can also replace the = operation with other math operations that can be performed on the scoreboard entry.

For example, to add the @s entry to $global:

#                            write the result *to* the $global entry#                            |                                 add to the existing value#                            |                                 |  get the value *from* @s#                            |                                 |  |scoreboard players operation $global fennifith.animals_spawned += @s fennifith.animals_spawned

The operation subcommand only runs on scoreboard entries, so we cannot pass constant values to it. scoreboard players operation $global fennifith.animals_spawned /= 2 is, unfortunately, not a command that the game will run.

If we want to divide our $global entry by two, we need to write the divisor value to another temporary scoreboard first.

# set the "$divisor" variable to "2"scoreboard players set $divisor fennifith.animals_spawned 2# divide the "$global" entry by "$divisor" (2)scoreboard players operation $global fennifith.animals_spawned /= $divisor fennifith.animals_spawned

This results in $global, which was previously 6, being divided by 2 — as such, its value is now 3.

Here is a list of all the other operations that can be performed with this command. lhs denotes the left hand side of the operation (the scoreboard entry being written to), while rhs denotes the right hand side.

• = sets lhs to the value of rhs
• += adds rhs to lhs
• -= subtracts rhs from lhs
• *= multiplies lhs by rhs
• /= divides lhs by rhs
• %= sets lhs to the remainder of lhs / rhs
• < sets lhs to rhs only if rhs is smaller
• > sets lhs to rhs only if rhs is larger
• >< swaps the values of lhs and rhs

While both sides of these operations accept entity selectors, only lhs can refer to multiple entities. For example, @e[type=pig] could be used to set the scoreboards of every pig entity in the game.

In rhs, you may need to add a limit=1 attribute to limit the number of entities that it can select.

Displaying scores

In order to see what scores are applied to any entity, there are a few methods of displaying the scoreboard values to players.

In-game display

The /scoreboard objectives setdisplay subcommand can be used to set a particular scoreboard to display in part of the UI. For example, /scoreboard objectives setdisplay sidebar fennifith.animals_spawned will show every player and the number of animals they have spawned in a sidebar on the right of the screen.

More areas other than sidebar include:

• list, which shows the scores next to player names in the tab menu (in Multiplayer only)
• belowName, which displays a player's score underneath their name tag

Sidebar	List	Below Name

/tellraw command

The /tellraw command can be used to send a formatted message in the game chat. It has a wide variety of uses and formatting options, one of which can embed a scoreboard value into the printed message.

/tellraw accepts an array of arguments which it concatenates together to form its message. To reference a score in this array, we can write an element with the structure {"score":{"name":"<selector>","objective":"<objective>"}}. For example, here is a command that prints the number of animals that the player (@s) has spawned:

tellraw @s ["You have summoned ",{"score":{"name":"@s","objective":"fennifith.animals_spawned"}}," animals!"]

Conditions with scoreboard values

What if we have a command that we only want to run if the player has a certain score?

In the previous article, you may have noticed that /execute has an additional if score subcommand. We can use this to check our scoreboard values as a condition!

Comparing values between scoreboards

With the <, <=, =, >=, or > symbols, we can use this command to compare values between different scoreboard entries. For example, the following command compares a player's score between the fennifith.animals_spawned and fennifith.berries_eaten scoreboards...

#       check a score condition...#       |        if the player's "fennifith.animals_spawned" score...#       |        |                            is greater than...#       |        |                            | the player's "fennifith.berries_eaten" score...#       |        |                            | |                              send the player a message!#       |        |                            | |                              |execute if score @s fennifith.animals_spawned > @s fennifith.berries_eaten run tellraw @s "You've spawned more animals than berries!"

In this example, if the player's score for fennifith.animals_spawned is greater than fennifith.berries_eaten, the condition will be valid — and it will run the tellraw command that follows it.

Comparing number ranges with "matches"

Using the matches option, it is also possible to directly compare a scoreboard with a number range.

#       if this score condition is valid...#       |        for the current player's entry in "fennifith.animals_spawned"...#       |        |                            if its value matches "0"...#       |        |                            |             send the player a message!#       |        |                            |             |execute if score @s fennifith.animals_spawned matches 0 run tellraw @s "You haven't summoned any animals yet!"

This command checks if the player's score in "fennifith.animals_spawned" is exactly equal to 0. However, we could also use ..0 for "less than or equal", 0.. for "greater than or equal", and so on.

Number ranges can also be bound on both sides — such as 10..50 for "between 10 and 50" — and are inclusively bound, meaning that a range of 10..50 will also include both 10 and 50 in addition to any numbers in-between.

Checking nonexistent scores

What happens if we access a scoreboard entry that doesn't exist? Normally, the game treats nonexistent scoreboard entries as "0" — the /scoreboard players add command, for example, will increase any nonexistent score to "1".

However, this works a bit differently for if score conditions. If we check the condition $nonexistent fennifith.animals_spawned matches 0.., it won't run the command — because $nonexistent doesn't have a value. Both the range 0.. and ..0 will fail — if the score has a value, we would expect at least one of those conditions to be true.

Normally, this behavior is not a concern — if you are checking a scoreboard in a condition, it is generally expected that the condition will not work for any unset scores. However, if you want to directly check if a score exists, the following command is one way to do that...

#       check that $nonexistent <= 0#       |                                                               check that $nonexistent >= 0#       |                                                               |                                                                   if neither are true, the score cannot exist#       |                                                               |                                                                   |execute unless score $nonexistent fennifith.animals_spawned matches ..0 unless score $nonexistent fennifith.animals_spawned matches 0.. run tellraw @s "The score for $nonexistent in fennifith.animals_spawned doesn't exist!"

There's another slightly simpler way to check this, which takes advantage of the maximum value that the game can store in a scoreboard. Minecraft's scoreboards are limited by Java's minimum/maximum integer size of 32 bits, or a range from -2147483648 to 2147483647. We can write this in a single condition to check if the score is anywhere within that range.

#       check if the score is anywhere within Java's integer bounds#       |                                                                                       if not, the score cannot exist#       |                                                                                       |execute unless score $nonexistent fennifith.animals_spawned matches -2147483648..2147483647 run tellraw @s "The score for $nonexistent in fennifith.animals_spawned doesn't exist!"

Tracking statistics

Scoreboards can also be created to track game statistics, such as the number of blocks mined or number of times an item has been used. These can be found in the game by opening the pause menu in any world or server and clicking the "Statistics" button — and the names used to reference them can be found on the Minecraft wiki.

We can use any statistic as the second argument of /scoreboard objectives add when we create a new objective — for example:

scoreboard objectives add fennifith.animals_carrot_stick minecraft.used:minecraft.carrot_on_a_stick

Note

These statistics are only tracked for players! While we can still manipulate scoreboard values for other entities using commands, non-player entities do not have statistics, and their objectives will not be updated when an action is performed.

While this scoreboard will be updated when its statistic changes, its entries can also be individually changed by the data pack, so it might not necessarily reflect the same value as the statistic at all times.

For example, we can create the scoreboard above to track the number of times a "Carrot on a Stick" has been used. If we then set our entry to 0 in that scoreboard, its value will stay at 0, regardless of the player's statistic for that item. If the player then uses the "Carrot on a Stick" again, the statistic and the scoreboard will both increase by 1.

Detecting events with statistics

We can use this behavior in our tick.mcfunction (which runs on every game tick) to detect when a player has used the carrot on a stick. We'll first set the value for all players to 0, then check the scoreboard on every tick to see if it has increased. If it has, we know that the item has been used, and can reset it to 0 to detect it again.

To check each player's value in our scoreboard, we can use the /execute if score subcommand along with a number range to conditionally execute our function if the scoreboard has a value >= 1.

If it does, we'll run the fennifith:animals/spawn function — which was created in the previous article — to spawn a group of animals.

1. We first need to create our scoreboard when our data pack is loaded by the game — so we'll place the following line in our load.mcfunction:

   # data/fennifith/functions/animals/load.mcfunction# create a new scoreboard tracking the "carrot_on_a_stick" statisticscoreboard objectives add fennifith.animals_carrot_stick minecraft.used:minecraft.carrot_on_a_stick

2. Then, we can place a command in tick.mcfunction to run our fennifith:animals/spawn function if the scoreboard has a value >= 1.

   # data/fennifith/functions/animals/tick.mcfunction#       for every player in the game...#       |     if their score for "carrot_stick" is >= 1#       |     |                                                      spawn some animals#       |     |                                                      |execute as @a if score @s fennifith.animals_carrot_stick matches 1.. run function fennifith:animals/spawn

3. Finally, after we run our function, we need to reset the scoreboard value so that it won't run until the item is used again:

   # set the "carrot_stick" score for all players to 0scoreboard players set @a fennifith.animals_carrot_stick 0

Examples of scoreboard functionality

Applying unique values to each entity in a selector

If we have an entity selector, such as @e[type=pig], we might want to assign a different scoreboard value to each entity. This can be done somewhat concisely using the execute store result subcommand...

# create a dummy objective to store unique pig entity idsscoreboard objectives add fennifith.animals_id dummy# set a $counter variable to 0scoreboard players set $counter fennifith.animals_id 0#       for every entity in @e[type=pig]...#       |               store the result as the entity's "fennifith.animals_id" score#       |               |                                              add "1" to the $counter variable#       |               |                                              |execute as @e[type=pig] store result score @s fennifith.animals_id run scoreboard players add $counter fennifith.animals_id 1

For each pig entity, the scoreboard add command increments our $counter variable by 1. Conveniently, the add command also returns the total value of its scoreboard as its result, so we can use that to store the incremented value as the pig entity's score.

Challenge: Maximum value of a scoreboard

Now that the fennifith.animals_id scoreboard has a few entries in it, how can we find the highest score it contains? (without using the $counter variable...)

To accomplish this, we can use the @e[type=pig] selector to target every pig entity in the game, and store the result in $max fennifith.animals_id.

# initially, set the max value to 0scoreboard players set $max fennifith.animals_id 0#       for every pig entity in the game...#       |               run a scoreboard operation...#       |               |                                set $max in fennifith.animals_id...#       |               |                                |                         if the following value is larger...#       |               |                                |                         | to @s in fennifith.animals_id.#       |               |                                |                         | |execute as @e[type=pig] run scoreboard players operation $max fennifith.animals_id > @s fennifith.animals_id

Conclusion

This article has covered most of the scoreboard commands we can use, but there is a lot more that can be done with them. These can be used throughout functions to write almost any numerical logic; try experimenting to see what you can accomplish!

In the next post, we'll cover advancements, which provide some alternative ways to detect specific player actions and other conditions.