UUIDs in Minecraft
A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit number used by Minecraft to distinguish object instances.
Representations
- Hyphenated hexadecimal (RFC 9562):
8-4-4-4-12groups, e.g.f81d4fae-7dec-11d0-a765-00a0c91e6bf6. Leading zeros per group may be omitted (00000001-0002-0003-0004-000000000005=1-2-3-4-5). - Hexadecimal: same without hyphens; zeros cannot be omitted.
- Most/Least: high/low 64 bits as two longs (e.g.
UUIDMost/UUIDLeast); pre-1.16 only, fully replaced by the int-array format. - Int array: 4 32-bit numbers, e.g.
[I;-132296786,2112623056,-1486552928,-920753162].
Versions and variants
UUIDs have 5 versions (1/2: time + MAC; 3/5: string hashes; 4: fully random). The version nibble sits at position A in xxxxxxxx-xxxx-Axxx-Bxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx. The B position is the variant: 0xx (Apollo NCS), 10x (RFC 4122, "variant 1"; Java "variant 2"), 110 (old Microsoft, Java "variant 6"), 111 (reserved, Java "variant 7").
In Minecraft
Java Edition uses version 4, variant 1 (RFC) UUIDs — fully random except the metadata — generated via UUID.randomUUID().