Privacy

Stoke is software you run yourself. We don’t run your servers, we don’t have accounts on them, and we don’t collect your group’s data. This page explains what each part of Stoke does with information.

This website

• No cookies, no tracking, no accounts. The site is plain pages. It remembers your light or dark choice in your own browser, and nothing else.
• No analytics today. If we add visitor counts later, they will be cookie-free and won’t identify you, and this page will say so first.
• The service hosting the site may keep ordinary request logs (your IP address, the page, the time) for security, as every web host does.

A Stoke panel

A Stoke panel runs on a machine that its host controls: someone in your group, not us. Everything a panel keeps stays on that machine: accounts, chat and direct messages, who played and when, positions on the map, linked Steam and Minecraft players, and backups. Voice passes through the host’s panel and isn’t recorded.

We, Stoke’s publisher, receive none of it. If you have a question about what a panel keeps about you, ask its host: they can see it, change it and delete it.

To do its job, a panel talks to these services on its host’s behalf:

• Steam (Valve), to install and update Valheim’s server, and for “Sign in with Steam”, which tells the panel your Steam ID and name.
• Thunderstore and Modrinth, to find and download mods.
• Mojang, PaperMC, FabricMC and Adoptium, to download Minecraft’s servers and Java; and Mojang’s public API, to look up a Minecraft player’s ID from their name.
• Stoke’s own servers, to check for a newer version of Stoke and to fetch information about mods. These requests carry the panel’s version and address, nothing about its people.

The Stoke launcher

The launcher, on a player’s Windows PC, talks to your group’s panel (to sign you in to it, fetch the server’s mods, and update itself), and to the download sources above for the mods themselves.

Signing in with Microsoft (Minecraft, coming soon)

Starting Minecraft from the launcher is on its way: it needs Mojang’s approval of Stoke’s Microsoft sign-in, which we’ve applied for. Until then, Minecraft players use their own Minecraft launcher, and nothing below happens. Once it’s approved, the launcher will sign you in with your Microsoft account, as Minecraft’s own launcher does, and this is how it will work:

• It will ask Microsoft only for Xbox Live sign-in. It never sees your Microsoft password: you type that on Microsoft’s own page, in your browser.
• With that sign-in, it will get from Xbox Live and Minecraft’s services your Minecraft name and player ID, whether you own Minecraft, and a game token that lets the game join servers.
• It will keep a sign-in token on your PC only, encrypted so that only your Windows account can read it, so you don’t have to sign in every time. It’s deleted if the sign-in stops working; to remove it yourself, delete %LOCALAPPDATA%\Stoke\Launcher\microsoft-sign-in.bin.
• None of this will be sent to the panel or to us. Your group’s panel learns who you are in Minecraft the same way any Minecraft server does: when you join it.

Stoke will be open source from version 1.0, the launcher included, so anyone can check this for themselves.

What we don’t do

No ads, no selling or sharing data, no tracking across sites. Stoke is free, and supported only by people who choose to.

Contact

Questions about this page: hello@stokeserver.com.