Create more. Worry less about distribution and storage intricacies.
A Minecraft resource and data pack optimizer which aims to achieve the best possible compression, performance and protection, improving pack distribution, storage and in-game load times. Anecdotal evidence shows that, with the default options, version v0.2.1 was capable of reducing the size of the Witchcraft & Wizardary resource pack ZIP file by Floo Network (version 1.6.2) from 118 MiB to 57 MiB, a 51.69% size reduction, and it got better over time.
PackSquash walks through the pack files that it recognizes in a directory, applying per-file configurable lossy and lossless compression techniques, and builds a ZIP file with the results that can be directly used by Minecraft. Currently, PackSquash can apply the following techniques:
- For PNG images: color quantization to generate a color palette, coupled with lossless bit depth, compression and color type reduction, and metadata removal. The quantization, although it is pretty subtle or even unneeded for common texture sizes, can be disabled if lossless quality is desired. These operations are performed by the well known
imagequant(used inpngquant) andoxipnglibraries. - For Ogg (.ogg and .oga), MP3, Opus, FLAC and WAV files: channel mixing, resampling, transcoding, pitch shifting and tag removal. The default settings are meant to be good enough for in-game music, such that most listeners will think that the quality is good and not distracting. Because channel mixing may change how the Minecraft sound engine computes positional effects (see MC-146721), PackSquash won't do it by default.
- For JSON files (.json, .jsonc and .mcmeta; if OptiFine mod support is enabled, also .jem and .jpm): minification, by removing unneeded whitespace. As a side bonus, because minification requires parsing first, PackSquash also acts as a strict JSON file validator, which also accepts and discards comments. However, it doesn't catch errors that are not against the JSON format but can confuse Minecraft.
- For shader files (.vsh and .fsh): minification, by removing unneeded whitespace. As with JSON files, PackSquash will perform basic validation on them.
- For OptiFine properties files (Java .properties; only if OptiFine mod support is enabled): minification, by removing unneeded whitespace. As with JSON files, performing minification requires parsing the file, so PackSquash will show basic validation errors.
In addition to these techniques, the files that are not already compressed by design (namely, Ogg and PNG files) are losslessly compressed using the Zopfli algorithm, which is a state of the art DEFLATE encoder made by Google. It is tuned for very high space savings at the cost of performance, whilst being compatible with every DEFLATE decoder. For even higher savings it is possible to try to compress already compressed files and increase the number of compression iterations, although this slows down the process significantly. Conversely, if lower savings are acceptable in exchange for faster execution, it is possible to reduce the number of compression iterations or skip it altogether.
PackSquash is also capable of doing the following things, although they are disabled by default because they require informed decisions to be made by the user:
- Reusing the ZIP files it previously generated to skip compressing files that did not change between executions, which vastly speeds up its execution for incremental workflows, where only a few files change each time.
- Deduplicating identical files within the generated ZIP file. This means that the contents of files that are repeated several times over will be stored only once.
- Protecting the generated ZIP files, making them harder to read by most ZIP manipulation programs.
If you are using a Debian-like Linux distro (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.), the recommended way to install PackSquash is via our APT repository, because it makes the process much more easier, better integrated with your package management programs and more convenient to stay updated, should you choose to do so. Please refer to the installation guide for details.
Alternatively, for other operating systems, or when you can't use our APT repository for some reason, you can download the executable for the latest stable release from GitHub Releases.
Finally, if you are into these sort of things, you can download the latest unstable build from GitHub Actions, or build the source yourself.
PackSquash is a command line application, so it must be executed from a command prompt, a shortcut, a command-line shell or a script. You can customize how it works by means of an options file, which contains per-file compression options and several other parameters. If no options file is specified, or if it is a dash ("-"), the options will be read from the standard input stream (usually, your keyboard or the output of another command). If in doubt, you can check out the command line argument syntax by launching PackSquash with the -h parameter.
For more information about the format of the options file, check the Options files wiki article on GitHub.
If you want a GUI for using PackSquash, or even authoring resource packs in general, you may want to try out the Quiver project, which is a third-party resource pack creator and manager for Minecraft that integrates with PackSquash. Just install PackSquash dependencies, open the resource pack folder, tweak the options file if you need to, and enjoy!
Like the license says, this software is provided without any warranty, with the hope that you find it useful. But that doesn't mean I don't welcome constructive feedback, suggestions, congratulations or assisting you on your usage of PackSquash (if I can and want to). If you wish to drop me a line for whatever reason related to PackSquash, you can contact me on Discord: AlexTMjugador#5124.
Also, if you speak Spanish, you may find that Comunidad Aylas, our Spanish-speaking community, suits you well. You can join us on Discord. Don't forget to introduce yourself!
You can use all of PackSquash for free for whatever you want, and will always be able to. One of the things I enjoy the most of making free software is the feeling that I'm doing something good and useful for others. With that said, PackSquash is arguably innovative, and some things were only possible to implement thanks to original knowledge of Minecraft internals acquired via static analysis of its deobfuscated code, which is an activity that is commonly referred to as reverse engineering. This is time consuming, and engineers in companies get paid for doing this kind of things. If you want to say "thank you" in a way that words can't describe, or motivate me to stay committed to the project and advance in the roadmap, sending me some money would be a nice way to do so! You can choose any of the platforms shown below:
Any funds I receive will be used for personal spending, but if I see that there is some economic interest in my work, I may decide, after making a public announcement, to establish some tiers and perks (retroactively, benefiting those who sponsored the project before they got introduced too), add more payment methods, or use them for donations and funding campaigns.