Texture pack



A texture pack is a collection of files that is used to change the in-game textures of blocks, items, mobs and the GUI. They are zip files that have various PNG images in them and a pack.txt. The native resolution of Minecraft's textures are 16×16 (measured pixels in block height and width). 32×32, 64×64, 128×128, 256×256 and 512×512 textures are referred to as ‘HD’. Any texture can be animated in Minecraft 1.5 or later. All PC versions of Minecraft support custom textures, although old versions (1.2.2 or earlier) require the modification of the minecraft.jar file. Versions prior to 1.5 required a patch/mod, such as MCPatcher or OptiFine, for HD packs and animated textures. Texture packs can be read without being in a .zip file, which allows the use of the "texture pack reloading" key (which is + ).

Changes in Minecraft 1.5
During MineCon 2012 Mojang announced that Minecraft will support HD texture packs and animated texture packs in the Redstone Update.

Here is a video of the announcement:

Starting from Minecraft 1.5, or snapshot 13w02a specifically, the "terrain.png" and "gui/items.png" files were replaced by individual block and item images (sheet images). These individual images are "stitched" together again at runtime, which will make sure that the default artwork is used if images are missing in the selected texture pack.

The game also no longer creates procedural textures for fire, lava, water, portals, clocks or compasses. Instead, the sheet image for these blocks and items needs to contain a pre-drawn animation. The upside is that the animations will not be limited to these blocks, but can be used for any sheet image. Also, the game will allow texture packs to mix and match sheet image resolution. For example, if an HD texture pack is missing a certain sheet image, the game will be able to use the default one even though it has a different format (16x16 pixels).

Installing a texture pack

 * 1) Download a texture pack from the site of your choice. Most texture packs are in ZIP file format, but as long as it has the necessary files (Pack.txt), Minecraft will recognize a folder as a texture pack. If you create your own textures, you can ZIP them if you feel it is necessary. For in-depth instructions on obtaining the files to make your own custom texture pack go to Tutorials/Custom Texture Packs. However this is not necessary, as of snapshot 12w23a, for as long as pack.txt exists, it will be recognized as a texture pack.
 * 2) Run Minecraft. If you already have Minecraft running, make sure you save and quit the world: you need to at least be in the main menu to continue.
 * 3) Click Texture Packs button. (If you do not see it, go to Options)
 * 4) Click Open Texture Pack Folder button; this will open the folder where Minecraft stores all texture packs. If nothing happens, you need to find the folder manually. Depending on your operating system it is:
 * Windows XP/Vista/7/8:
 * GNU/Linux:  (This folder may be hidden in the Home folder)
 * Mac OS X:  (This folder may be hidden)


 * 1) You do not have to have Minecraft closed to place the texture pack in the opened folder.
 * 2) In a few seconds the texture pack will appear in Minecraft. Select it and click "Done". The texture pack is now applied, you may load your world and see the difference. If Minecraft did not update, simply exit and reopen the texture packs screen.

Installation tips

 * Texture packs may redesign only some textures. So if the main menu looks the same after you select a pack, it doesn't mean the pack is not working. If you feel the menu needs to be changed, contact the author of the texture pack, unless you have created it, in which case you will need to modify the textures yourself.
 * You may install many texture packs. The texture pack list can be scrolled by dragging the scrollbars up or down.
 * Minecraft may lock the currently used texture pack (for example, if the pack contains custom textures for user interface), so the file can't be overwritten. If you need to update the pack, you may need to temporarily switch to the default pack and then overwrite the file.
 * To get an unzipped directory to show as a texture pack in Minecraft, that directory needs a pack.txt in it. This, however, did not work prior to 12w23a.
 * Keep in mind that, if you downloaded a texture pack in ZIP form, it may contain another folder inside of it that has the texture pack's title, this is the actual texture pack. In this case, you will need to either copy, cut, or drag this folder to the texture packs folder.
 * If you have an older version of Minecraft (1.2.5 for example) and you install a Texture pack for a newer version, the texture pack will still run properly, and will ignore the unused items or blocks.

Native resolution (16px)
Click on the link above to see the list of native resolution texture packs.

Low resolution (8px or lower)
Click on the link above to see the list of low resolution texture packs. Some packs may need a patcher.

High resolution (32px or more)
Note: Versions prior to 1.5 require a patcher, such as MCPatcher or Optifine, to display HD textures properly. Versions prior to Beta 1.8 will crash if you attempt to use an HD pack.

Creating a texture pack


To create a custom texture pack, the files you wish to modify must be extracted from minecraft.jar with an archiving or decompression program such as 7-Zip or WinRAR. They can then be edited with any image editing program that can read/write the PNG file format and handle transparency. A program such as GIMP, Pixlr or Paint.NET will work well, as all of them are provided free of charge. Programs such as Microsoft Paint do not support transparency, and will replace transparent areas with color (or pure white), ruining the texture. An example of this is that ice will become a solid color. However, it is possible to create a texture pack using only paint in Windows.

Edit each PNG file as desired, and save them as 32-bit PNG files to preserve transparency. Then, create a zip file of the modified files, preserving all of the original folder hierarchy, however this is not necessary. Any omitted file will be replaced by the default texture pack's version. If you find that nothing changes when you select your texture pack, make sure that the files are properly placed in the root of the zip (a common error is to place them within a folder in the zip, which will not work).

Animated textures
In Minecraft 1.5 or later, almost any block or item can be animated. Clocks, Compasses, Water, and Lava have special rules for animation (see Special Cases below). Animated textures require an additional .txt file to define the animation. The text file must have the same name as the image (such as "dirt.txt" for "dirt.png").

The format of the text file is simply numbers specifying which frames to pick (indices start from 0), separated by either commas or new lines. For example, if you would want to ping-pong an animation that has 4 frames, the contents of text file would look like this:

0,1,2,3,2,1

... or like this: 0 1 2 3 2 1

To make the animation slower than the default of 10 updates per second, the animation file can be specified to keep the frame for any number of ticks using an asterisk and the number of ticks to keep it. For example, to make the animation above four times slower, the file would look like this:

0*4,1*4,2*4,3*4,2*4,1*4

Special cases
Water and Lava: The water, lava, and lava_flow textures all have default text files, which must be overwritten if you have an animation that varies from the default length of 32 frames for water and 16 frames for lava. The textures for flowing lava and water use 4 slots of the terrain texture. To simplify the construction of the artwork, these two sheet images are double the size of the other blocks in the texture pack (32x32 pixels for the default resolution).

Compass: The compass cannot be animated, instead it will use its animation slots to render the direction of the needle. The compass can have any number of directions, but the first one (frame 0) should point south and the others should gradually turn clock-wise. Naturally, the last frame should almost point south again (slightly to the east).

Clock: Like the compass, the clock cannot be animated. Its animation frames are used to render the time of day. The first frame is noon, then counting clock-wise a whole day. Midnight is at half of the animation's length (so if you have 32 frames for the clock, midnight should be at 16).

Resources

 * Dinnerbone has released an "unstitcher" tool which converts old texture packs into 1.5 format. The format separates each individual block texture into its own file. The "unstitcher" tool can be downloaded here.
 * A version both able to handle bigger texture packs, and to convert old-style animations (as used by Optifine and MCPatcher), is available here (direct link). (Dinnerbone approved)
 * The sheet images used in the in-development version of 13w02a can be found here: http://assets.minecraft.net/unstitcher/textures.zip Check here to see examples of the special images (such as lava and the compass).

Mod textures can be found among their files in their downloaded zip/jar. Some looking around may be needed as mod folder structures can vary. (Please improve list.)

Sharing and distributing
Curse, has made promoting your texture packs an ease with their new texture pack uploader. Doing so instantly enables anyone using the Curse client to easily install the texture pack; and also makes you eligible for the author rewards program.

Trivia

 * The selected texture pack is saved to the options.txt file in the .minecraft folder, so you can also manually change the "skin:" value to the name of the .zip. This can be useful if the texturepack crashes the main menu, thus making impossible to change the pack using the texture selection screen. Simply erase the pack name and it will be reset to default.
 * Changing the dimensions of FoliageColor.png, GrassColor.png, or WaterColor.png (found in the 'misc' folder) will cause a severe loading issue that causes world generation to be corrupt and switching to any other texture pack to cause a "saving chunks" crash.

Resources

 * An unofficial list of texture packs on the Minecraft Forum (over 150 textures)