Make Your Own Minecraft Texture Pack: A Step-by-Step Guide (2025)

Ever wished you could reshape the world of Minecraft to your liking? Imagine switching up every block and sprucing up the main menu scenery. If you've ever played around with cool Minecraft texture packs, you've gotten a taste of that freedom. But it always stops there, right? Texture packs let you overhaul the look of your game, but you're stuck with the choices the creator made. Want total artistic control? Then think about crafting your very own texture pack. If that sounds fun, this guide is for you.

What You'll Need: Minecraft Java or Bedrock installed to get started.

Texture packs are a game-changer. They give you the power to redo the look of almost anything — characters, blocks, and even liquids. It's like getting a brand-new game without paying a thing. A skilled texture pack designer might even get their creation onto the official Minecraft Marketplace and earn money from it.

Making a texture pack is not super hard, but there are several steps. To keep things simple, this guide is broken down into easy-to-follow sections.

The world of Minecraft is simple and blocky. An in-game texture is just an image wrapped around a bunch of cubes. These cubes come together to form structures, characters, and items in the game. Swap out those image files, and those changes show up directly in your Minecraft world.

Texture Resolution: How Sharp Should You Go?

The standard texture size is 16×16 pixels, but you can go up to 128×128 pixels. Keep in mind that very high-resolution textures can be too demanding for some devices to handle. Sticking with 16×16 or 32×32 pixels is usually the safest bet.

Easy Texture Pack Creation Tools

The easiest way to make Minecraft texture packs is by using free creation tools. Here are some good options for each platform:

Nova Skin Resource Pack Creator (PC)

Nova Skin's resource creator is a great online tool for making Minecraft texture packs. It has a simple folder-based layout that helps you find the textures for each model in the game, along with a built-in editor similar to MS Paint. You can use it to change fonts, music, particles, and more. Many people use this tool to put together a full resource pack quickly. Save your new pack to the cloud or download it to your computer for use in Minecraft.

AddOns Maker for Minecraft PE (Android)

Important: As of 2025, there is no reliable app or tool for making texture packs for iOS, iPadOS, or console. If you want to make a texture pack for the Bedrock edition on those platforms, use the manual guide below.

This Android app is a well-liked tool on the Play Store. It has a built-in editor for painting over existing in-game textures, and you can also grab pre-made textures to apply to specific items. The app also lets you add structures, sounds, trees, biomes, and new recipes — effectively turning your texture pack into a modpack for Minecraft PE. The one downside is that it's ad-heavy, but it offers a lot of useful features if you can look past that.

How to Create a Minecraft Texture Pack for Java Edition

Because Minecraft Java's game files aren't encrypted, it's easy to find and edit the texture files — no additional downloads required. Here's what you'll need:

• Minecraft Java Edition
• A program to unzip files (Windows Explorer works fine)
• A simple image editor (MS Paint is enough)
• A text editor (Notepad)

If you're on Mac, Windows, or Linux, your device already has these tools or a suitable alternative. Once you've decided what you want to change, follow these steps:

1. Find the game's directory. Paste %appdata%\.minecraft\ into your File Explorer address bar, or press Win + R to open the Run window and paste it there.
2. Open the versions folder inside the Minecraft directory, then open the folder for the newest game version (currently Minecraft 1.21.4).
3. Copy the .jar file with your game's version number (Ctrl + C). It will be the only file with a .jar extension unless you have mods installed.
4. Create a new folder in the Minecraft directory (or anywhere on your PC) and paste the .jar file there (Ctrl + V). This folder can have any name.
5. Rename the file and change the extension from .jar to .zip. Then right-click it and choose the extract option. You can also extract it directly if you have WinZip or WinRAR installed.

How to Change Textures in Minecraft

Now you can start editing the texture files. Here's how:

1. Open the extracted folder and navigate to the textures folder by going to assets → minecraft → textures.
2. Inside the textures folder, you'll find subfolders for different categories. The block folder contains every block in Minecraft.
3. The entity folder holds animals and characters. There are also folders for the environment and items. Choose the category you want to edit and open its folder.
4. Find the PNG file you want to edit, right-click it, and open it in MS Paint (or your preferred image editor).
5. Some texture files are located in subfolders due to a layering system, so look carefully if you don't find what you're after right away.
6. Make your changes in the image editor and save the file as a PNG in the same location with the same filename. Repeat this process for every texture you want to change.

How to Create an MCMETA File

Go back to the main extracted folder (the one containing the assets subfolder) after editing all your textures. Right-click and create a new text file. Open it and paste in the following code:

{

  "pack": {

    "pack_format": 7,

    "description": "Write a description for your texture pack here"

  }

}

Replace the description with your own text, but avoid using special symbols. Update the pack_format number to match your version of Minecraft using the table below:

pack_format	Game Version
15	1.20 to 1.20.1
18	1.20.2 Pre-Release 2
34	Snapshot 24W21A – 1.21
48	1.21 – 1.21.1
57	1.21.2 – 1.21.3
61	1.21.4 – Pre-Release 1

Save the file as pack.mcmeta. When saving, make sure to select All Files in the file type dropdown so it doesn't save as a .txt file.

How to Save and Install Your Texture Pack

Once your textures are edited and your pack.mcmeta file is saved, you're almost done. Select all the files in your extracted folder (including the assets folder and the pack.mcmeta file) and compress them into a new .zip file. Give it any name you like.

To install it in Minecraft Java Edition:

1. Open Minecraft and go to Options → Resource Packs.
2. Click Open Pack Folder. This opens the resourcepacks folder in your Minecraft directory.
3. Move your .zip file into that folder.
4. Go back to Minecraft — your new texture pack should appear in the list. Click the arrow to activate it, then click Done.

Your texture pack is now live in your Minecraft world. Enjoy the results of your hard work, and don't be afraid to keep tweaking it as you go. Have questions or want to share what you made? Drop a comment below!