Troubleshooting and FAQ

I can’t see any tracks

• Is the ground soft? Prints appear on grass, dirt, sand, gravel, mud, snow and similar ground. Stone, wood, glass, ice, terracotta, packed mud and other hard floors take none, and neither does water. See Footprints and surfaces.
• Was the creature walking? Standing still, flying, swimming and riding leave no prints.
• Is the server in Item mode? Then you see tracks only while wearing the goggles. See Visible or Item mode.
• Are the prints old? Without goggles a print fades out by three minutes. Goggles show it for its whole life, ten minutes by default, less in rain or snow.
• Are you too far away? By default prints are sent within 24 blocks in Visible mode and 32 blocks in Item mode, with or without goggles, and your drawDistance cannot go beyond that.
• Is it a player’s trail? The server may have turned player tracks off with playerTracks = false.
• Did the server restart? Tracks are kept in memory only and do not survive a restart.

The goggles don’t show a reading

• Wear the goggles. Holding them is not enough. Right-click to put them on, or use a Curios head slot.
• Look at a print within six blocks, and hold your gaze on it for a moment.
• Make sure nothing solid is between you and the print.

What does “No continuation visible” mean?

The goggles found no evidence of where the trail went next. The creature may have swum, been ridden, teleported, or crossed hard ground, or the next prints may have faded or been trimmed.

I don’t see a scent line

• The scent line shows only through the goggles and only on the trail you are looking at.
• Prints older than about a minute have no scent line.
• A step whose next step is missing or more than eight blocks away has no line to it; its specks drift about two blocks ahead and fade instead.

See Scent line.

Prints look flat

Check indentStrength in your client settings. 0 gives flat prints; 1 is the default pressed-in look. See Configuration.

Fewer prints than I expected

• Your client draws at most maxDecalsPerFrame prints (default 600).
• On a busy server, trail history is capped and older straight stretches thin out. See Keeping it light.
• Crouched prints wear twice as fast.

Updating Spoor

Install the same Spoor version on the server and on every client. When you update, replace the jar on both sides together.

FAQ

Do I need the goggles to see tracks? Not by default. Without them you see the prints, but not the species, age or scent line. A server can switch to Item mode so that only goggle wearers see tracks.

Will tracks still be there after a restart? No. Tracks are kept in memory only.

Does it find the animal for me? No. The scent line shows where a creature was heading, not where it is now, and it does not find a route around obstacles.

Do prints change the ground? No. They are only a visual effect. They do not remove terrain or change collisions.

Does everyone need the mod? Yes. Install it on the server and on every player’s client.

Can I use it in a modpack? Yes. Spoor is licensed under LGPL-3.0-only.

Does it work with other mods’ animals? Naturalist animals get proper shapes. Other modded creatures use a fallback shape, and a server can add proper feet with a datapack profile.

Is there a Fabric version? No. Spoor 0.1.0 is for NeoForge only.

Where do I download it? Coming soon. The CurseForge listing is not live yet.