Have you ever wanted to run a vanilla server but hate not being able to actually log and enforce griefing rules? This datapack can help by logging a wide variety of player actions such as opening chests, placing TNT, using flint and steel, and more. All you have to do is place the datapack in your world/datapacks folder and then reload, the setup function will create all the required scoreboard objectives. Then you'll be able to see in your server log every time a player does one of the tracked actions.

The Log:

The log might look a little convoluted and confusing (because truthfully it is, vanilla minecraft doesn't have a easy way to simply log something without saying it to every player), but all the relevant information is there:

VanilLog isn't intended to stop or prevent griefing, but give admins the information to determine who may have done the griefing. I made it specifically to have as little impact on gameplay as possible, you're free to modify it to log whatever else you might want to log and if you have any suggestions please let me know, this is the first datapack I've ever made so I'm open to constructive criticism. It is also not perfect, there are probably plenty of ways to get around detection due to limitations in minecraft, such as detecting killing non mob entities not working and no stats for opening chest boats, chest minecarts, etc.

A complete list of actions that VanilLog currently logs:


To briefly explain how it works, it monitors scoreboard objectives for all the actions you want to log. When a player does something you want to log, the datapack summons a baby pig with a name describing the action exactly 1000 blocks above the player. It then spawns a harming area effect cloud at the pig and sets the "owner" of the cloud to the player. The potion kills the pig, and the pigs death message serves as the log entry.

The latest version of the pack supports minecraft servers 1.20 and up, but there are compatibility versions for servers going back to 1.15. If you need a version compatible with a pre 1.20 server you can download it from https://github.com/TheAdorableCat/VanilLog/releases/tag/v1.4

If you have any issues or suggestions, please leave a comment or use https://github.com/TheAdorableCat/VanilLog/issues