Minecraft Locator Bar Color

The locator bar is the strip of waypoint markers Java Edition draws where the experience bar normally sits when you are on a multiplayer server. Every player within 120 degrees of where you are looking gets a dot on it, positioned horizontally by their direction from your camera. The dot's shape tells you roughly how far away they are — a square under 179 blocks, a circle to 230, then smaller versions of both — and a small arrow appears above or below the dot when the player is higher or lower than your camera pitch. It was added in Java 1.21.6 and in Bedrock 1.21.90.

From your UUID, and nothing else. Java takes the account's UUID, runs Java's UUID.hashCode() over it — the two 64-bit halves XORed together, then the high and low 32 bits XORed again — and keeps the lowest 24 bits as a raw RGB value. The renderer then pins the brightness: it keeps the hue and saturation but forces the strongest channel to 230, which is 90% of 255. That is why every locator color has at least one channel sitting on exactly 230, and why the same account always gets the same color on every server.

Yes, and it is common. There are 2^24 (16,777,216) raw colors but only 159,391 colors survive the brightness step, so on average about 105 different UUIDs collapse onto each one. With millions of accounts in existence, thousands of players share any given color. The list on this page is exactly that: the players in Crafty's database whose markers are drawn in the same color as the one you looked up.

Not the UUID-derived one, but it can be overridden. A scoreboard team color replaces it for everyone who sees that team, and the /waypoint command sets a waypoint's color and style outright — operators and datapacks use it to color-code teams, roles or events. There is no client setting or resource pack that changes your own default color, because the value is derived server-side from your account UUID.

No. Bedrock got the locator bar in 1.21.90, but the color is assigned randomly per session instead of being derived from the account, so a Bedrock player's marker can be a different color every time they join. Everything on this page is the Java Edition rule.

Because the HUD renderer normalizes brightness before drawing. It converts the raw color to HSV, sets the value component to 90%, and converts back — which scales every channel so the largest one lands on 230 (0xE6). Raw black is the single exception: it has no hue to preserve, so it becomes the neutral gray #E6E6E6. The practical effect is that no locator marker is ever dark, so every dot stays readable against the sky, the ground and the HUD.

Rarity comes from how many of the 16,777,216 raw colors collapse onto yours. The tightest colors have only 26 raw preimages and the loosest has 256, with a median of 105 — so a color at the bottom of that range is roughly four times less likely than a typical one. This page reports that count, where it sits on the 26–256 scale, and how many players in Crafty's database actually hold it against how many the math predicts.