Unable to set the item name of player heads.

[BoskoVojinovic]

Expected behavior

The following code:

ItemStack item = ItemStack.of(Material.PLAYER_HEAD,1);
PlayerProfile profile = new CraftPlayerProfile(null,null);
profile.setProperty(new ProfileProperty("textures",texture));
item.editMeta(SkullMeta.class,m->{
   m.setPlayerProfile(profile);
   m.itemName(name);
});

Should produce a playerhead of custom base64 texture, and a custom item name(not the former "DisplayName" in italics).

Observed/Actual behavior

The resulting player head has the correct texture, but the call to meta.itemName is completely ignored, and the name defaults back to "'s head" since no profile name is actually set.

Steps/models to reproduce

Run the code from the Expected behaviour section, and give yourself the resulting ItemStack.

An example base64 texture to use:
eyJ0ZXh0dXJlcyI6eyJTS0lOIjp7InVybCI6Imh0dHA6Ly90ZXh0dXJlcy5taW5lY3JhZnQubmV0L3RleHR1cmUvMzk5YWQ3YTA0MzE2OTI5OTRiNmM0MTJjN2VhZmI5ZTBmYzQ5OTc1MjQwYjczYTI3ZDI0ZWQ3OTcwMzVmYjg5NCJ9fX0=

Plugin and Datapack List

No other plugins
No datapacks

Paper version

This server is running Paper version 1.21.11-110-main@c59990d (2026-02-06T11:11:01Z) (Implementing API version 1.21.11-R0.1-SNAPSHOT)
You are running the latest version
Previous version: 1.21.11-101-57c7aac (MC: 1.21.11)

Other

PS:

• Setting the name in a separate editMeta block after the profile-setting one produces the same behaviour.
• The UUID of the profile has no effect.
• The order of operations between setting the profile and name seems to have no impact.

[electronicboy]

From the perspective of the server, that data is either set on the stack or it is not, it's the client which controls what data is prioritised when rendering it

[masmc05]

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-snapshot-24w37a

minecraft:item_name
Name provided by this component always has the lowest priority
That means it will be overriden by components like minecraft:potion_contents

Also this was an intentional change by mojang, you should use display name for such cases, and as electronicboy said the server has no power over rendering priority

[BoskoVojinovic]

I see. In that case, there is probably another skull-specific item component overriding the name on the client? Anyway, this behavior should definitely be mentioned in the methods javadoc!