Custom Skin Textures

Custom Skin Textures

MCA builds villagers from separate texture layers instead of one complete player skin. This makes it possible to mix body skins, clothing, hairstyles, and eyes while still keeping genetics and villager customization working.

If you are making a resource pack, start with the guide for the part you want to change:

Guide	What it covers
Custom Clothing	Clothes, professions, genders, zombie variants, and clothing JSON
Custom Hairstyles	Tintable hair, overlays, hair style JSON, and layered hairstyles
Custom Eye Textures	Tintable eye masks, fixed pixels, eye colors, and eye JSON

If you would rather create and preview clothing or hairstyles in game, see Skin Editor.

Server data and client textures

MCA treats appearance identity as server-owned data. Clothing, hairstyles, body skins, and eye styles are registered by server-side JSON, while the PNG files themselves remain client resources.

A normal custom appearance pack therefore has two parts:

• a resource pack containing the PNG textures
• a datapack containing the JSON entries

For single player, put the resource pack in the normal resourcepacks folder and the datapack in the world's datapacks folder.

For a server, the server needs the datapack and players need the matching resource pack.

The server's effective appearance catalog is the source of truth. MCA synchronizes that catalog to clients when they join and after a successful datapack reload, and also when server-managed library clothing or hair changes. Clients use that synchronized catalog for the editor and rendering instead of independently deciding which appearance IDs exist.

A client resource pack may still replace the PNG for an existing ID without changing server data. To add a new selectable or inheritable appearance ID, add the matching server-side JSON entry as well.

Texture size

Clothing and hair textures use normal 64x64 Minecraft skin layouts. Transparent pixels let the villager's lower layers show through. The outer skin layer is supported, so jackets, sleeves, hats, and similar details can use the normal second-layer areas of the Minecraft skin format.

Do not paint a complete player skin into a clothing or hairstyle texture. Each file should contain only the layer it is meant to add.

Existing packs

Older MCA packs may use older JSON examples or file layouts. The dedicated pages above document the current format used by the 1.21.1 codebase.