Explore the Minecraft
Server Universe
After 12 months of continuous scanning, MCScans has been paused due to funding constraints. The search and indexing pipeline is currently offline, but the project is not dead — all collected datasets remain available.
We'll be back when resources allow. Thank you to everyone who used the API and contributed feedback.
Servers Indexed
~2.1M
Unique IPs scanned
Scan Duration
12 mo
Continuous operation
Status
Paused
Data frozen in place
Statistics reflect last recorded values before shutdown. Live search is unavailable.
Infrastructure
The scanning pipeline was built on a chain of open-source and hosted tools working in sequence.
ZMap performed full IPv4 sweeps targeting port 25565 (and common alternates), identifying live Minecraft server endpoints at internet scale. Hosting was provided by DMZHost.
A custom fork of ZGrab2 with a minecraft2 module performed the full Minecraft status handshake against each discovered IP, extracting MOTD, player counts, version strings, favicon data, and forge/mod lists.
Worker processes and data pipeline jobs were run on VPS instances provided by VPS Vault, handling the throughput required to process ZMap output and dispatch ZGrab2 workers at scale.
Parsed server records were persisted to MongoDB as the primary datastore, with a mirrored Elasticsearch index powering the full-text search, version filtering, mod queries, and API endpoints exposed to users. This is the layer that is currently offline.
Datasets
All raw scan output and processed server records collected over the 12-month run are preserved. These are available for research and archival purposes.
Full Archive
JSON scan dumps · ZMap CSV Exports · Historical snapshots