Minecraft Chat Parser

A Discord chat-bot that connects a specified Discord channel with a Minecraft server in-game chat, allowing to pass messages between the two.

Features

• Messages from a Discord channel appear in Minecraft in-game chat as:

  <username> message content
  

  • The username of the Discord user sending the message (not the bot) is used.
  • Color is added to the <username> to help distinguish it from other in-game chat (defaults to teal).
  • The message content supports some emojis, but not all of them.

• Messages from Minecraft in-game chat appear in a Discord text channel as:

  📷 username [BOT] MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM AM/PM
  message content
  

  • Player username is used as the sender
  • The display image 📷 is replaced with the head of the player avatar using the https://minotar.net/ API together with the player username, for example:

  

  • Username and timestamp format defaults to what Discord uses, the [BOT] label is added by Discord automatically.
  • The message content is sent as-is (e.g. :D will appear as text, not as 😄)

• Discord bot will indicate player presence on the server with custom status messages:

  • It will set its status to 🌙Idle and a custom status message to Waiting for players when there are no players on the server.
  • It will set its status to 🟢Online when there are players and set the status message to Watching username if only one player is on the server, and Watching # players when the number of players is #. In the latter case, the full list of online usernames is visible in the bot activity details.

Installation

Discord bot setup

1. Create a new bot application in the Discord Developer Portal.
2. In Settings > Bot use the Reset Token button to generate a new token, copy that for later.
3. In Settings > Bot > Privileged Gateway Intents enable PRESENCE INTENT and MESSAGE CONTENT INTENT options.
4. In Settings > OAuth2 > Url Generator enable the scope bot and bot permissions Manage Webhooks, Read Messages/View Channels, Send Messages, and Use Embedded Activities.
5. Visit the generated URL to invite the bot into your Discord channel.
6. Copy the ID of a Discord text channel you want the bot to participate
   • enable Developer Mode (under User Settings > Advanced)
   • right-click on the channel to get the ID.

Chat application setup

The bot requires RCON access to a Minecraft server instance to be able to send in-game messages and to get the list of online players, and read access to the Minecraft log file to read the in-game chat messages.

An example compose file is included with the project to show how to run the bot together with a Minecraft server instance that is leveraging the https://github.com/itzg/docker-minecraft-server docker image. Fill in the empty env variables and run docker compose up -d.

Alternatively, the bot can also be executed as a stand-alone Node.js application running on the same server where your Minecraft instance is located. Requires Node 18 or later to be present on the server.

• clone this repo,
• run npm install,
• run npm run build,
• create a .env file from .env.example and fill in the config variables in that file,
• and run node dist/app.js

Configuration

• DISCORD_TOKEN - Discord access token generated during bot setup.
• DISCORD_CHANNEL_ID - Text channel ID where the bot participates.
• DISCORD_LOGIN_TIMEOUT - Number of milliseconds the bot waits to establish the initial Discord session. Defaults to 60000.
• WEBHOOK_NAME - Pretty much an arbitrary name for the webhook. Defaults to mc-chat-parser.
• RCON_PASSWORD - Password for the Minecraft server instance RCON connection.
• RCON_HOST - Hostname or IP for the RCON connection. Defaults to localhost.
• RCON_PORT - Port number for the RCON connection. Defaults to 25575.
• SENDER_COLOR - Color to display the <username> part in the in-game chat. Defaults to #2CBAA8 (teal).
• LOG_FILE - Path to the Minecraft server logs file. Defaults to /logs/latest.log
• TIMESTAMP_PATTERN - Timestamp format used in Minecraft server logs file. Defaults to \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}

Authors

• Derek Mäekask KartulUdus
• Jaak Kütt jaakkytt

Licence

ISC

Contribution

1. Start by creating an issue https://github.com/KartulUdus/mc-chat-parser/issue.
2. Fork and modify.
3. Add/update tests (sufficiently, a subjective measure).
4. Make sure tests pass (npm run test).
5. Make sure ESLint passes (npm run lint).
6. Update the version nr in package.json following Semantic Versioning 2.0.0.
7. Reference the issue nr in the branch (e.g. feature/nr-few-words) and commit messages.
8. Create a pull request.