The Universal Scanner
- By
A sci-fi bio-scanner that analyzes any living entity vanilla or modded and archives real, data-backed stats into a Universal Bestiary.
Universal Scanner adds a handheld bio-scanner and a Universal Bestiary to Minecraft. Point the scanner at any mob, vanilla or from another mod, and it reads the entity's real, in-game data to build a bestiary entry: health, melee/ranged damage, explosion damage, armor, movement speed, spawn biomes/dimensions/structures, and more.
No invented numbers, no static lookup tables pretending to cover every possible mod: every stat is pulled live from the entity itself (attributes, AI goals, spawn data, difficulty scaling), so the bestiary stays accurate even for mobs the scanner has never seen before.
Features
- Universal stat scanning: health, melee damage, ranged/explosion damage, armor, knockback resistance, and more, read directly from each entity's own attributes.
- Speed analysis: Min/Max Speed reflects the mob's real theoretical movement range (base attribute + known behavioral modifiers like panic/flee bursts), not just how fast it happened to be moving when scanned.
- Spawn data: biomes, dimensions, and structures pulled from actual spawn tables and datapack/BiomeModifier data.
- Hologram viewer: see a live, animated 3D model of every scanned mob directly in the bestiary, driven by the mob's own real animation system (idle, walking, swimming, flying, sitting, attacking, hurt, death).
- Persistent per-player bestiary: synced across sessions, works in singleplayer and multiplayer.
Universal Scanner is built to be honest about what it can and can't determine. It will never invent a stat it can't actually verify. A few categories of mobs hit real, structural limits of what's technically readable from outside the mod that adds them:
- Spawn data on modded mobs: spawn biomes/dimensions are read from the actual game data (vanilla tables + datapack/BiomeModifier spawns). Mobs that spawn through custom mod code (events, scripted spawners) have no enumerable spawn data, so they're honestly labeled "Dynamic spawning" instead of showing an invented list.
- Ranged attack classification: attack types are derived from real entity data, goal analysis, and documented damage values. On heavily custom modded mobs the label can occasionally be approximate. The damage shown is always the one the mod itself exposes.
- Hologram animations: the animation viewer drives the model's real movement system, so it works for any standard-model mob (vanilla and most mods). Mobs using fully custom animation frameworks (e.g. GeckoLib controllers) only offer the universal states (Idle/Hurt/Death). Unique per-species animations aren't reproduced. By design, a state is only listed when it can actually be played, never simulated.
If you run into a mob that seems misclassified, feel free to report it. Most cases end up being genuinely undecidable from outside the mod's own code, but it's worth checking.
Ps: AI was also used to help create the mod. I know, I know... “AI slop,” boo! But I don’t know how to code, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The The Universal Scanner Team
