Texture pack

A Texture Pack is a file you download in order to change the appearance, otherwise known as texture, of blocks, items and mobs. They may occasionally change the sounds. Installed textures can be changed by going to Texture Packs on the Main Menu. Since Alpha 1.2.0 Texture packs are officially supported by the game.



Installation
To install a texture pack, the file must first be obtained in a ZIP format. Without decompressing the file, place the ZIP file in: This path can be opened by using the Open Texture Pack Folder button from the game client.
 * Windows:
 * Linux:
 * Mac OS X:

Once a texture pack is installed, it can be selected in the Mods and Texture Packs screen accessible from the main menu (but not in-game). The texture pack list can be scrolled by dragging it up or down.

Texture Pack Creation
To create a custom pack the needed files must be extracted from minecraft.jar with an archiving or decompression program (preferably one that supports transperancy, like gimp). They can then be edited with any image editing program. When zipped back into archive, names and folder structure must be maintained.

Trivia

 * Prior to the Alpha 1.2.2 update, users would need to manually change the texture packs by overwriting their minecraft.jar files.

Resources

 * Large list of texture packs on the Minecraft Forum
 * Second large list of texture packs on the Minecraft Forum