Custom Clothing

Custom Clothing

← Custom Skin Textures

MCA clothing is a transparent 64x64 Minecraft skin layer drawn over the villager's body. Clothing can be shared by everyone or limited to a gender, profession, or special age group.

Quick setup

For one simple piece of female clothing, your pack can look like this:

assets/example/skins/clothing/normal/female/none/my_clothes.png
data/example/skins/clothing/female.json

The PNG belongs in the resource pack. The JSON belongs in the datapack.

Then add this entry to data/example/skins/clothing/female.json:

[
  {
    "id": "example:skins/clothing/normal/female/none/my_clothes.png",
    "profession": "minecraft:none"
  }
]

That is enough for a basic outfit.

Making the texture

Use a normal 64x64 Minecraft skin layout, but leave everything transparent except the clothing.

Do not include the villager's face, skin, or hair in the clothing texture. MCA adds those separately.

The outer skin layer is supported, so you can use the normal jacket, sleeve, pants, and hat-layer areas for extra depth.

The in-game Skin Editor shows the same cleanup process visually:

Recommended file layout

The texture identifier can point to any valid resource location, but this layout keeps larger packs easy to manage:

assets/[yourNamespace]/skins/clothing/normal/[gender]/[profession]/[name].png

For example:

assets/example/skins/clothing/normal/female/farmer/straw_hat_outfit.png
assets/example/skins/clothing/normal/neutral/none/travel_clothes.png

gender is normally female, male, or neutral.

Clothing JSON

Clothing files go under:

data/[yourNamespace]/skins/clothing/

Using female.json, male.json, or neutral.json is the simplest option because MCA can infer the gender from the file name.

Example with several entries:

[
  {
    "id": "example:skins/clothing/normal/female/none/casual.png",
    "profession": "minecraft:none"
  },
  {
    "id": "example:skins/clothing/normal/female/farmer/farmer.png",
    "profession": "minecraft:farmer"
  },
  {
    "id": "example:skins/clothing/normal/female/guard/guard.png",
    "profession": "mca:guard"
  }
]

Each entry needs an id. Other fields are optional.

gender

You can put the gender directly on an entry instead of relying on the JSON file name:

{
  "id": "example:skins/clothing/normal/neutral/none/travel_clothes.png",
  "gender": "neutral"
}

neutral clothing can be used by either gender.

profession

Use a full profession identifier when clothing should belong to a particular profession:

"profession": "minecraft:farmer"

MCA professions work the same way:

"profession": "mca:guard"

minecraft:none is used for the normal unemployed clothing pool.

If profession is left out, the clothing is not tied to one profession.

exclude

exclude is useful for special clothing that should not appear as a normal editor choice or in the general no-profession pool.

MCA uses this for things such as baby, toddler, and child clothing:

{
  "id": "example:skins/clothing/normal/female/child/special.png",
  "profession": "mca:child",
  "exclude": true
}

The outfit can still be selected when its matching special pool is requested.

temperature

The current loader accepts a temperature value and stores it with the clothing metadata. The default is 0.

Most normal resource packs can leave it out. Current static clothing selection does not choose local pack entries by temperature.

Zombie and burnt variants

If the normal clothing identifier contains /normal/, MCA automatically looks for matching zombie and burnt variants by replacing that part of the path.

For example:

assets/example/skins/clothing/normal/female/farmer/outfit.png
assets/example/skins/clothing/zombie/female/farmer/outfit.png
assets/example/skins/clothing/burnt/female/farmer/outfit.png

The normal texture is the main texture. Zombie and burnt versions are optional. If a matching variant is missing, MCA falls back to the normal texture.

A note about older examples

Older MCA documentation showed count and per-clothing chance examples. The current 1.21.1 clothing loader reads individual entries and does not use those old fields for clothing selection.

List each clothing entry explicitly instead.

Common mistakes

• Do not paint skin, a face, or hair into the clothing PNG.
• Make sure the id exactly matches the texture in the resource pack.
• Use a JSON array for clothing files, as shown above.
• Use full profession identifiers such as minecraft:farmer or mca:guard.
• Keep the normal texture available even if you also provide zombie or burnt versions.
• Remember that clothing needs both the resource pack and datapack sides installed.

See Skin Editor if you would rather create and preview clothing with MCA's in-game editor.