How to delete Player Data in Minecraft

Player data is the data Minecraft stores about an individual player. This includes their inventory, Ender Chest contents, position in the world, health and hunger, active potion effects, and data on any tamed pets they own. Deleting it gives that player a completely fresh start, as if they had never joined your server before.

This is useful in a few specific situations:

• A player’s inventory is corrupted, for example, by an item that crashes the server every time it loads, sometimes called a “crash item.”
• You’ve banned a player and want to wipe their inventory and progress, rather than leaving it intact in case they’re ever unbanned.
• A player wants a clean start, and you’d rather reset just their data instead of resetting the whole server.

Finding the Player’s UUID

To delete a specific player’s data, you’ll need their UUID, a unique identifier assigned to every Minecraft account. It’s a long string of numbers and letters, formatted like this:

1a234567-123b-49b5-a04d-ed67e68f763e

Unlike a username, which a player could technically change, a UUID is permanent and tied to that one account forever, this is also why Minecraft uses UUIDs internally to name player data files, rather than usernames.

You can look up a player’s UUID by entering their username into a site like minecraftuuid.com.

Deleting a Player’s Data

1. Go to the AleForge Panel.
2. Stop your server.
3. Go to File Manager.
4. Navigate to the player data folder. This depends on your Minecraft version, so check which structure your world actually has before proceeding.

Minecraft version	Player data folder
26.1 and newer	world/players/data/
1.21.11 and older	world/playerdata/

If your world uses a custom name instead of world, replace world with that name in the path.

5. Find the two files matching the player’s UUID, and delete both:

   • UUID.dat
   • UUID.dat_old

   For example, using the UUID above, you’d delete 1a234567-123b-49b5-a04d-ed67e68f763e.dat and 1a234567-123b-49b5-a04d-ed67e68f763e.dat_old.

6. Start your server.

That player’s data is now wiped. The next time they join, Minecraft will treat them as a brand new player, spawning them at the world spawn point with an empty inventory, full health, and no Ender Chest contents.

A Few Things to Know

• This only deletes inventory and position-related data. Advancements and statistics are stored in separate files, and aren’t affected unless you delete those too. See the table below.

Data	26.1 and newer	1.21.11 and older
Advancements	world/players/advancements/UUID.json	world/advancements/UUID.json
Statistics	world/players/stats/UUID.json	world/stats/UUID.json

• This doesn’t remove the player from your whitelist, ban list, or operator list. Those are managed separately, through the whitelist, ban-player, and op/deop commands.
• Make a backup first if you’re not completely sure. Deleting these files is permanent, there’s no way to recover a player’s inventory afterward unless you have a backup from before the deletion.
• This works per-player. Deleting one player’s .dat files has no effect on any other player’s data, so there’s no need to worry about accidentally affecting anyone else on your server.