How to use the scoreboard function in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition

Originating from Minecraft: Java Edition, the scoreboard function has made its way to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition as of the platform's 1.7.0 version, giving Bedrock players even more aspects of the game to tweak with commands.

Scoreboards can be incredibly useful in Minecraft worlds, especially with regards to multiplayer. Scoreboards can track myriad statistics such as the number of players online, number of kills, number of deaths, or other things such as a player's experience level or the measurements that a certain team has accomplished.

At the moment, the capacity of scoreboards is somewhat limited in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, though Mojang is undoubtedly working on future content updates to expand its capacity.

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Minecraft: Setting up and using a scoreboard in Bedrock Edition

A simple scoreboard, shown above, keeps track of Steve and Alex's score (Image via Mojang)

Even though scoreboards aren't at their best yet in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, there is still plenty that can be done with the function for players and administrators to enjoy.

Minecraft players can set up a scoreboard by performing the following actions:

1. Open the in-game chat window where commands are normally entered.
2. Type "/scoreboard objectives add" without the parenthesis, players will then have a few options to choose from with regards to what objective they'd like to add to their scoreboard.
3. There are many criterion to choose from, but at the moment Minecraft: Bedrock Edition only has access to the "dummy" criterion, meaning the score will have to manually be changed with commands.
4. As an example, let's say a player wants to add a money counter. The syntax for the scoreboard would be "/scoreboard objectives add Money dummy" without parenthesis.
5. To place this scoreboard to the sidebar, Minecraft players can then use the command "/scoreboard objectives setdisplay sidebar Money" which should display the scoreboard to the right of the screen.
6. To add players to the scoreboard, the command "/scoreboard players add" can be used followed by the targeting commands @a (all players), @e (all entities), @p (closest player), @r (random player), @s (yourself). So for example, to display all of the players' money on the server, they would use the syntax "/scoreboard players add @a Money" without the parenthesis.
7. Since the "dummy" criterion is the only one available in Bedrock Edition, any amounts of "money" in this example will need to be set manually with commands as per the dummy criterion's requirements. For example, "/scoreboard players add @s money 15" would add 15 of the money integer to the player's scoreboard, or "/scoreboard players remove @a 10" would take 10 money from every player on the scoreboard.

Essentially anything can take the place of the name "Money" as a dummy criterion since it is manually altered by Minecraft players with operator privileges who can change the scoreboard with commands.

Eventually, Mojang is likely to introduce other qualifiers seen in Minecraft: Java Edition such as Health, XP, Deathcount, or Playerkillcount to provide additional information with scoreboards in Bedrock Edition as well.

While it isn't clear when this will happen since scoreboards have only recently been introduced, they will likely need to go through some testing and tweaking before the full breadth of scoreboards are introduced to the Bedrock platform.