A Kitty year in review
The year 2025 is coming to a close and everyone is making one of these so I'll chime in.
2025 has been a truly moving year for me, with many ups and downs. Every success was accompanied by a fail. The more happy am I how the project I initially developed while having nothing to do with a 40°C fever has turned out. KittyScan is without doubt the biggest and most challenging project I have had to date. But also the most interesting in my opinion.
Before 2026 begins and new challenges are to be tackled I want to look back at the year and give an outlook for the future. (Spoiler: It includes Open Source)
Kitty Scan in numbers
Let's start with the raw numbers. In the nearly 9 months KittyScan has been running it has gathered a grand total of
1.12Munique IPs running Minecraft servers3.27Munique players playing on these servers254Kserver icons
All of this amounts to a database which has grown to a total 150GB in size. The biggest table being the one holding a grand total of 219,673,945 datapoints for all the servers KittyScan has found - amassing to 103GB in size. You can read more about the troubles this has caused me in this blog post.
Our V1 honeypots have been contacted a total of 2,354,554 times. While our V2 honeypots that have been running for about a month now have been contacted 791993 times. These combined have come from a grand total of 9,302 IPs.
According to Google, the KittyScan Website had a total 12,752 impressions resulting in 2,807 clicks within the last 12 months. (I somehow managed to remove the robots.txt from the image so Google delisted us for a solid 3 months ... oops)
IPv6 is the future
... seems to be the "We are only 10 years away from fusion power" of the IT world.
But to be serious, IPv6 is still mostly unexplored when it comes to server scanning. This can be mostly attributed to the increased difficulty of the target generation part of scanning. While you can just scan the whole public IPv4 internet within an hour, that would be a multi million year feat for IPv6.
IPv6 scanning is an interesting research field. In the last month I already explored some options and launched KittyScanIPv6. Next year this will become a big part of my work, expanding the KittyVerse.
KittyScan and OpenSource
Nearly all KittyScan code is closed source. This will not change. I do not feel comfortable with sharing my tooling, even if it is easy to replicate.
However, starting next year I will start extracting parts of the KittyScan toolset into public libraries for everyone to use. These include functionality which I believe to be useful to others.
All libraries will be released under the MIT Licence, so that there are as few restrictions as possible on their usage. It is important to note that I refuse any contributions or feature requests for these. If you want to add functionality please just create a fork and maintain it yourself. I do not have the motivation to triage 3rd party input.
The first library is already public. KittyPrint is the utility I use to detect web services such as World Maps that are hosted on servers running Minecraft servers.
The next library will be a utility to download the spawn chunks of a given server - the same way KittyWorld does it. This is something I am currently developing to reduce my reliance on external libraries.
Thank you
I want to thank everyone that has supported the project over the last 9 months. Having such a great community helps with ignoring all the idiots such a project will inevitably attract.
I will stay focused on my goal of providing useful information to players and admins alike and raising awareness of the privacy and security caveats of running a Minecraft server.
Currently this project is entirely funded by me. If you'd like to support this project please consider subscribing to my Patreon you might even receive a Lillychan sticker pack.
But that was it for this year. I wish you a good transition into 2026 and a happy new year.