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github-actions[bot] edited this page Aug 4, 2026 · 1 revision

Telemetry

NeroCreatures can report its own crashes to the developer, so bugs get fixed without anybody having to notice, reproduce and file them. This page says exactly what that means, what it does not mean, and how to turn it off.

It is on by default and you can turn it off. Crash reporting is live from 0.1.0 onward. It reports NeroCreatures' own crashes and nothing about you — see Turning it off.

What it is

Opt-out crash reporting via Sentry, the same wiring every other Nero mod uses. When it is active, it sends:

  • Unhandled exceptions that originate in NeroCreatures code. The filter is by package: a crash in another mod, or in Minecraft itself, is not sent. If NeroCreatures is not in the stack trace, it is not our bug and it is not our business.
  • Handled failures the mod chose to report anyway — a command that threw, a link surface that failed — so an error that was survived is still visible as a defect.
  • A small amount of timing data on a 5% sample (the spawn sweep, boss phase transitions), to catch performance regressions.

What it never sends

  • No player names, UUIDs, IP addresses, chat or coordinates. sendDefaultPii is off and the server's hostname is never attached.
  • No world data. Not your seed, your save name or your dimension list.
  • No file paths from your machine — your OS account name is scrubbed out of any path before an event leaves.
  • No session linking. The session id is random per launch and is not tied to anything across launches, so two crashes cannot be connected to the same person.

What does travel with a report is public, non-personal context: the mod version, the Minecraft version, the loader, whether it is a client or a dedicated server, whether it is a development run, a handful of server configuration values (spawnsEnabled and friends) — because a crash that only reproduces at non-default settings is otherwise impossible to chase — and the ids and versions of your other installed mods, capped at 300, because most hard crashes in a modded game are conflicts and the mod list is the first thing that makes one diagnosable. Those are public manifest strings, identifying the mods and not you.

Turning it off

In config/nerocreatures.properties:

telemetryEnabled=false

This is the one setting in NeroCreatures that is not server-authoritative. Every other key is decided by the server; this one is a personal choice and is read from your own config, on your own machine, so a server cannot switch your crash reporting back on.

Set it before launching. When telemetry is off, Sentry is never initialised at all — there is no "collected but not sent" state.

For the developer

  • The DSN lives in telemetry/NeroCreaturesTelemetry as DSN — a public, write-only ingest key, safe to ship in the jar. PLACEHOLDER_DSN remains as a guard: if DSN is ever set back to it (a fork, a stripped build), init() returns immediately and nothing is started. Do not remove that guard.
  • /nerocreatures telemetry-test fires one synthetic event to confirm end-to-end reporting on a real jar (see Commands). It reports honestly when nothing was sent — opted out, or an unconfigured build. Repeat calls in one session collapse into one event; restart to test again.
  • Development and IDE runs report under a dedicated development environment, so they never mix with real releases.

Why it is opt-out rather than opt-in

Because the alternative is not "more privacy", it is "no crash reports". A mod that crashes for 2% of players on one loader will never hear about it from an opt-in reporter, and those players simply stop playing. The trade is only defensible if the reporter is genuinely PII-free and genuinely easy to switch off — which is what the two lists above are for.

None of this is player data under POPIA or GDPR, because none of it identifies a person. The things that are player data live in the world save and are covered by Data storage and PRIVACY.md.

See also

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