Minecraft has attracted many thousands of people with its addictive gameplay and friendly community, despite its old-school visuals. Its simplistic visuals do have their unique charm and many people like to keep it that way, but for those that want a little more eye candy from this game, you have the option to add what is called a “texture pack”. These texture packs will change the look of items, terrain, characters and other items, and they vary from pack to pack. Bare in mind that you are only re-skinning the game and not improving the graphic quality, so don’t expect it to look like Crysis when you’re done. Do a bit of research online to see what tickles your fancy. Once you have selected the texture pack that you like, head back to this guide and we’ll show you how to install it on a Vista/Windows 7 PC and Mac OSX. Don’t worry -- it’s a very straightforward and easy process!
Before you get started, you will need an archiver and data compression utility program called WinRAR. You can download a trial version here, which will be enough to get this task done. There are alternatives to WinRAR, so feel free to explore if you like. Please note that this guide is based on WinRAR, so if you’re using another program the commands may differ. Once you have downloaded WinRAR or an alternative program, follow the instructions below to install it.
Unpacking texture pack.
To keep things simple we’ll do everything off the desktop. For this example I’ll be using the Tronic Revamped v2 Texture Pack. First off you’ll want to create a new folder so you can unpack your texture pack. This will help keep things organized and your PC desktop clean. You can name this new folder whatever you want. In this case, I’ve named it “Tronic Textures”. Right-click on the texture pack ZIP file and select Extract files…. then select Desktop and then Tronic Textures(or whatever you have decided to name that folder). Let WinRAR do its thing, leave the folder as is for now and we’ll get back to it a bit later.
There’s two ways to go about this process. One is to use the in-game menu and the other is to do it externally by editing the minecraft.jar file. However, adding textures in-game is lot easier. Both processes are shown here for those that are curious.
Installing a texture pack while in-game
- Open the Minecraft game and select mods and Texture Packs from the main menu.
- Click on the Open texture pack folder then the folder that contains the Minecraft textures will open.
- Open the folder you made earlier to unpack the texture pack that you downloaded and copy over the entire contents of that folder into Minecraft textures folder.
Press the Done button.
With the texture packs installed they will appear under the Select texture pack menu and all you need to do is select which pack you wish to use.
Installing a texture pack outside of the game
Now here’s the process of installing the texture pack. Press the windows Key + R to bring up the run command. Copy the following text %appdata%/.minecraft/bin
and paste it into box next to Open then select OK.
These are files that should come up.
After pressing OK, a number of files will appear on screen the one we are after is the minecraft.jar file so we can modify it with our texture pack. Before we start modifying this file make a back up of this original minecraft.jar file and save it to your desktop just in case something goes wrong.
Right click on the minecraft.jar, select open with then select WinRAR archiver. Have this window opened enough so you can see what you are doing and then keep it to one side of your screen.
Now open up the folder containing the unpacked texture files(the one I named Tronic Textures) and position that window next to the window we previously opened, which is showing the contents of the minecraft.jar file. What you will have to do now is replace some of the image files contained in the minecraft.jar file in order to add these new textures. Go to your textures folder and select everything (pressing Ctrl + A will select everything in this window), then click and drag the entire contents of that folder and drop it into the minecraft.jar folder. An “Archive and name parameters” popup window will appear. Under compression method, select best from the drop down box then press OK.
Installing a texture pack for Mac OSX
This short list of instructions will give you all the information that is needed to successfully guide you on your quest to install a texture pack on Mac OSX.
- Start by downloading a texture pack of your preferred choice. As an example, I am using MMGN’s very own tweaked version of Tronic, Tronic Revamped for Mac OSX.
- After the download, it will make things easier if you locate the file, and move it to the desktop. It will make the process a little less confusing this way.
- Open Finder, and click on the name of your computer in the sidebar. (It will have a house icon next to it)
- Go to “Library” , “Application Support” and finally “Minecraft”
Note It is vital to click on your name, then “Library” I have made the mistake of simply going to “Library” and worried that my Minecraft folder was missing.
- From there, select “Texture Packs” and drag the Zip file from your desktop into the “Texture Packs” folder. You can close finder after completing this.
- Open up Minecraft and select “Mods and Texture Packs” Then click on the desired texture pack, then hit “Done”.
- When you play Minecraft, the Texture Pack should be active. If you wish to change texture packs, simply repeat the simple steps.
These instructions for adding a texture pack in Mac OSX were kindly provided by l3ailey.
That’s it - you are all done. Open up the Minecraft client and check out the new textures that you have added to the game. If you followed the instructions correctly the game should start as normal, but if something did go wrong just replace the modified minecraft.jar file with the backup you saved on your desktop.
Related Minecraft Information
Minecraft Downloads discussion thread
Minecraft general discussion thread
Minecraft Server thread
How to Survive in Minecraft article
Minecraft: Success Story of 2010 (article)