Footprints and surfaces

Who leaves prints

Walking animals, mobs and players all leave footprints. Standing still, flying, swimming and riding do not.

Creatures without feet on the ground never leave prints: footless flyers, swimmers that do not walk, armor stands, shulkers and the Breeze.

Feet

Every creature has its own foot shape, sized from its Minecraft model. Babies leave smaller marks. Four-legged animals leave separate front and back prints, and two-legged creatures alternate one foot at a time.

Prints are drawn the Minecraft way: square corners, chunky pixel steps and simple shapes inspired by the models.

Who	Print
Player, zombie	Three broad tread blocks
Cow, pig, sheep	Stepped cloven tips
Horse	A square single-hoof stamp
Wolf	A wide pad and three square toes
Cat	A small pixel paw
Creeper	Square pads, not wolf paws
Skeleton	A narrow square contact
Iron golem	A broad square contact
Ravager	A large hoof
Rabbit	Short front paws and long hind feet
Turtle	Different front and rear flippers
Sniffer	Six separate feet

Every vanilla creature that walks has its own profile. Creatures from other mods use a safe fallback paw or boot shape unless a profile has been added for them. See Compatibility.

The pressed-in look

Prints look pressed into the ground: a darker floor, a broken dark lip on one side and a few lighter pixels on the other. Every print is lit from the same side, so a trail reads clearly at a glance.

Where prints overlap they merge into one dent, and the outline goes round the combined shape. Ground pressed twice looks darker. A creature’s consecutive prints never overlap each other.

A print keeps merging while its opacity stays above 0.08, starts new merges only above 0.12, and merges with at most eight others. Where two prints overlap, the clearer one keeps its whole shape and is cut out of the other, so the shading follows only the combined outline.

This is only a visual effect. The whole print, shading included, lies within 0.007 blocks of a flat plane just above the block. It does not remove terrain and does not change collisions. You can turn the pressed-in look down or off with indentStrength in your client settings; keep trackSize at 1.0 for the measured foot sizes.

Each new print also puffs a tiny dust particle tinted to the colour of the ground. Joining a world does not spray particles for old tracks.

Which ground takes prints

Prints appear only on soft, deformable ground:

• grass and the dirt family, mycelium and farmland
• sand and red sand, gravel and clay
• dirt paths
• mud and muddy mangrove roots
• moss
• soul sand and soul soil
• snow

No prints on stone, wood, metal, glass, ice, terracotta, packed mud and other hard floors. Water and other liquids never take prints. Powder snow takes a print only where a foot is actually supported on it, such as a player in leather boots.

A large foot can span neighbouring soft blocks. The part over stone, or over nothing, simply is not drawn. If the ground under a print is broken or changed, the print disappears within about a second. The server and your game use the same rule for which ground takes prints, and no chunk is ever loaded just to check one.

A server can change which blocks take prints. See Configuration.

How prints fade

• A print lasts ten minutes of game time by default: 600 seconds of game simulation at normal tick speed, not wall-clock time.
• Wear is counted once a second.
• Rain or snow falling on a print doubles how fast it wears. It counts only while it is actually raining or snowing, the print is open to the sky and the biome has rain or snow. Constant rain halves a print’s life; a short shower only speeds up wear while it lasts. A print under cover ages normally.
• As a print wears, its individual pixels fade out at staggered times and its shading softens. There are no sudden jumps between stages.
• Without goggles a print is fully clear for 60 seconds, then fades out by three minutes. Goggles show it for its whole life.
• Once a print has expired, nothing brings it back.