Missing textures and models

Minecraft makes use of missing textures and missing models to handle potential errors present in the game's resources as well as resource packs.

Missing texture
The missing texture is a texture used by Minecraft for handling cases where a suitable texture cannot be found. Outside of its use in missing models, this is almost always due to a texture being referenced which simply does not exist under that name.

The texture uses a prominent black and magenta  checkerboard $$ or a black  and magenta  checkerboard $$, in order to stand out as much as possible in most cases. Using bright colors is industry standard, and black and magenta is employed by other game development studios, notably Valve.

The texture is not intended to appear in vanilla gameplay, and cases where it does are due to misconfigured resource packs.

In Java Edition 1.17.1, the only ways to make it appear without using a resource pack is by creating item particles associated with either air or a spyglass. This can be done by using commands to create particles directly (/particle minecraft:item air or /particle minecraft:item spyglass), or by summoning a panda eating a spyglass.

List of occurrences in vanilla

 * "Vanilla" is defined as the game with no non-default texture packs or resource packs installed, as well as without mods.
 * This section only covers cases where the texture arises due to a texture being absent or invalid. Cases where the texture appears due to a model being absent or invalid are documented in the missing model subsection.

Particles

 * Block and item particles (breaking, broken, sprinting on, falling on, iron golem walking on, eating, ...)


 * Other particles

History of the texture itself

 * b1.4-13w17a platform differences

The missing texture used in these versions would be generated differently depending on the operating system and Java version.

Missing model
In an analogous fashion to the missing texture being used for instances where no texture is defined, the missing model is use in cases where no model is defined, or the model is invalid.

By default, the missing model is a full 16x16 cube which uses the missing texture on all six faces.

The missing model is obviously also never intended to appear in standard gameplay, and uses the missing texture again to appear prominent and highlight errors to fix.

Blocks

 * Blocks and variants accessible through normal gameplay


 * Blocks and variants accessible via commands, intentional


 * Blocks and variants accessible via commands, unintentional

Items

 * Valid data values


 * Invalid data values

History of the model itself

 * Block


 * Item

Translucency ordering
From 14w25a presumably up to somewhere in 1.15 or 1.16, there existed a remarkable visual bug where missing models associated with blocks that used translucent rendering would interact anomalously with the rendering of transparent blocks in the world, as well as of entities, including the holder. Unlike normal missing models, translicent blocks and other entities would render in front of such a model when held, even if they were physically farther away from the camera than it. However, this only applies if the distant entity or transparent block in question is not first occluded by the player model. As a result, the held translucent block can form a player-shaped silhouette around the player model in front of a background made of entities (such as paintings) or translucent blocks.

This effect can be seen without the use of resource packs up to 17w47a simply by holding ice, stained glass, stained glass panes or slime blocks of an invalid data value.

This effect also happened to particles and certain other objects in-game from 13w41a onwards.

Unloading the default resources
In 1.13 and its later development, the game would catch invalid resource packs and unload them automatically if errors were detected. This also included the default resources, meaning that appling a flawed resource pack would result in all assets being unloaded, and as such the missing error assets appearing everywhere.

Somewhere in 1.13.1, the game was made to unload all resource packs except the default resources in cases like these.

Interestingly, horses appeared completely white, rather than the expected missing texture.