Data Types

This page describes the various data types that Minecraft works with.

Type	Size (Bytes)	Range	Comment
Boolean	1	0 to 1	Written as a byte. Can either be 0x00 or 0x01.
Byte	1	-128 to 127	Signed, two’s complement.
Short	2	-32,768 to 32,767	Signed, two’s complement.
Integer	4	-2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647	Signed, two’s complement.
Long	8	-9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807	Signed, two’s complement.
Float	4		Single-precision 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point.
Double	8		Double-precision 64-bit IEEE 754 floating point.
String8	>=2		Modified UTF-8 string. Prefixed by an unsigned short containing the length of the string.
String16	>=2 and <= 240		UCS-2 string, big-endian. Prefixed by an unsigned short containing the length of the string in characters. UCS-2 consists of 16-bit words, each of which represent a Unicode code point between U+0000 and U+FFFF inclusive.

Entity Metadata

Entity Metadata is still largely undocumented, even on the wiki.vg archive