A free fan site to help players find the best loot in Minecraft Dungeons II (MCD II).
Overview
My daughters and I had a blast playing the original Minecraft Dungeons together, so I built the first Loot Hunter to help them find gilded loot, Ancient Mob runes and the like, without wrestling with spreadsheets. So when Minecraft Dungeons II landed, a brand-new Loot Hunter was a must.
Pick the gear, talismans and enchantment books you're after, set your level, and the Loot Hunter plans the fewest areas to farm for all of them. There's also a Build Helper for planning all 12 slots of your build, and a searchable database of every weapon, armour piece, artifact, effect, enchantment, boss and quest (press ⌘K on any page).
My role
It's my own project, so all of it: the design, the planner, the data pipeline and the site, built in about a week.
Key decision: plan the route, not just the drops
A drop table tells you where one item can drop, not where to go when you're after ten things at once. The planner treats that as a weighted set cover: it keeps picking the area that covers the most of your remaining targets with the best drop chances, starting with areas at or below your level, until everything is covered.
The game logic is pure functions, with no fetching and no React, so the same code runs on the server, in the browser and in 51 unit tests.
Keeping the data current
The game data comes from the brilliant folks at metabot.gg, who read it straight from the game files (props to them 🙌). A small importer crawls their pages politely, one request every two seconds and nothing their robots.txt rules out, then merges duplicates and writes it all into Sanity with a link back to each source page. When something needs fixing by hand, I can edit any item right on its page with Visual Editing.
Outcome
- Hunt lists and builds are saved in your browser, so there are no accounts to sign up for.
- It passes Lighthouse's accessibility audits.
- The original lives on at legacy.minecraftdungeonsloothunter.app, and old links redirect there.
And yes, Lexi and Maddi have much higher level loot than I do.
Build
Next.js, Sanity, Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui (on Base UI), with TanStack Table powering the sortable, filterable data tables.