What are minecraft texture packs?


Texture packs are compiled files of graphics that alter the look and feel of a game. There are hundreds if not thousands of texture packs available to you. Texture packs come in all sizes ranging from 8 x 8 to 256 x 256. What does this mean? Well, a single block in minecraft is composed of pixels. These pixels are arranged to create the image of that block typically 16 pixels by 16 pixels (16 x 16). When you upgrade to a texture pack using 256 pixels by 256 pixels, the quality of the in game graphics will greatly increase.

If you enjoy the look and feel of classic console games or prefer something a little more high teck, adding a texture pack can make minecraft more appealing to you

How to install texture packs

Installing texture packs is very simple. Before installing you will want to download McPatcher. McPatcher is a tool used to patch and calibrate HD texture packs. This is necessary for many of the texture packs that will interest you and should be used every time you install a new texture pack.

Step 1: Follow Step 1 and 2 for your respective Operating System in the "How to install mods" section above.
Step 2: Open the texture pack folder
Step 3: Download your texture pack directly to this folder or download it and drag-drop it into this folder.
Step 4: Close everything and run McPatcher

Want to make your own Minecraft texture packs? This step by step guide will show you how to find the right files, use an image editor to work with them and finally upload them to share with other Minecrafters. Let's jump right in!

At its most basic a Minecraft texture pack can be created by editing the .png files found in the .jar found in the .bin. If that didn't make sense, then you need to hit CTRL + R and type %appdata% then hit 'run'. Congratulations, you just found your .minecraft file. Open it to find the .bin, then open the .bin to get to the .jar. In order to open the .jar you'll need a program like WinRAR or WinZip.

Terrain textures can be found sitting peacefully about 3/4 of the way down the list of files in the minecraft.jar and are labelled terrain.png. The terrain textures file is a good place to start if you want to change the general ambiance of the minecraft environment.

Open the terrain.png in an image editing program. Note: Any image editing program you use will need to be able to handle transparency. MS Paint does not handle transparency. Photoshop is nice if you have it, but let's be realistic, not many people are going to spend several hundred dollars to buy a tool to make textures with. A good free option that will work in your web browser is sumo paint. I'd give that a try if you're stuck without any other image editing software.

Other textures can be found in other folders in the directory. Mobs, for instance, contains the .png files for pigs, chickens, etc.

Editing the textures is either not as easy as it seems or not as hard as you think it is, depending on whether you're wildly overconfident or not. It's not difficult to make changes to the .png files, however making those changes look good and tile well is a different matter. Experimentation is your best bet.

There are a couple of textures best left unchanged in the terrain.png if you're not a super expert, and they're both located in the upper right hand corner of the .png. One is the weird one with the word fire written on it - that's the fire animation. Leave it alone. The other is a blue square that looks like it might be water, it's not water, it's the portal animation. Leave it alone too.

You'll notice that there are some odd gray textures in the middle - left area. These are the grass and leaves styles. They're grey because the game overwrites them with various colors according to the biome being used.

How To Make Your Texture Pack Downloadable

To make an uploadable / downloadable texture pack that will work in the texture pack selection screen, start by making a new folder. This folder should NOT be in the final .zip, but it is a good way to keep everything in one place.

You'll then need to copy over the armor, art, environment, gui, terrain, mob, misc, item folders and also the terrain.png and particles.png.

You'll also need to create a pack.png. The pack.png will be the image that is displayed next to your texture pack. You can find a template for it in your minecraft.jar.

In addition to the pack.png, you'll need a pack.txt, which has a short line of text describing the pack.

Once you've got all these folders and and files you can zip them up into one folder using the archive or zip function of your zipping program. Name it something appropriate.

Voila! You have made a downloadable texture pack that can be put into Minecraft's texture pack folder and be selected from the textures menu.



Tips:
Texture packs may redesign only some textures. So if the main menu looks the same after you select a pack, this doesn't mean the pack is not working. 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.

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