The other day, my son was complaining that Achievements in Minecraft (Bedrock Edition on the Switch) had stopped working. He’d complete a task he was sure would trigger an Achievement and nothing would happen.

This – as any parent of a Minecraft-loving child will know – is not cool. So I did what any sane person would do and hoped it would magically fix itself.

After a week or so of this not happening, I started investigating obvious potential causes: client updates, network lag, server outages, changes to parental controls. No joy. I also found the Fix Achievements Not Displaying or Unlocking in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition FAQ, which was wildly unhelpful.

Eventually, I started spelunking through the Minecraft issue tracker to look for pointers and found MCPE-115808: Achievements and Statistics not updating, a five-year-old bug with many comments and linked issues, resolved as “Cannot Reproduce”.

This didn’t give me a direct solve, but one comment about how turning off Android Private DNS fixed it gave me enough of a clue to help me get at the problem: Minecraft Bedrock Edition uses Microsoft telemetry servers for Achievements and if these endpoints are unreachable, Achievements won’t work.

A while back I’d set up NextDNS with Hagezi’s Multi PRO blocklist and configured it as the DNS server on our home network. That blocklist contains these rules:

# XBox Live Achievements
# Microsoft uses the following domains, which are also used for other telemetry data, to display and track earned Xbox Achievements.
v10.events.data.microsoft.com
v20.events.data.microsoft.com
# CNAME
win-global-asimov-leafs-events-data.trafficmanager.net

The fix was straightforward. I added the domains to my NextDNS Allowlist:

v10.events.data.microsoft.com
v20.events.data.microsoft.com
win-global-asimov-leafs-events-data.trafficmanager.net

As well as fixing Minecraft Achievements, this re-enabled a chunk of Windows and Defender telemetry. My fix for this new problem is to avoid using Microsoft products as much as possible. YMMV.

If you’re hitting the same problem and use a DNS blocker (NextDNS, Pi-hole, AdGuard Home etc.), check its query log for blocked events.data.microsoft.com requests. Or temporarily switch the device’s DNS back to automatic and see if Achievements start unlocking.

It would have been lovely if the Minecraft client had generated an error rather than silently failing, but hey, ultimately this was my footgun. I just didn’t expect that adblocking would break something pretty key. One person’s important bizness metrics are another’s frustrated child, I guess.