Understanding the Texture Creation

OreShards creates textures on-the-fly by combining up to 3 existing textures. Those are a foreground texture, an alpha texture and a background texture.

Case 1: Simple Texture

In the simplest case there is one texture that should be used as-is. Specify it as foreground texture and leave the other two blank. OreShards will do no processing if it is used as shard texture. If it is used as block texture, then an existing alpha channel will be stripped first.

Case 2: Block Texture

A block texture usually is a base texture (e.g. stone) with parts of an ore texture (e.g. iron_ore) painted over it. To do this, you need alpha channel information to specify where the foreground texture should be transparent. This is the alpha texture. OreShards will only use its alpha channel and ignore the rest. As in the first case, an existing alpha channel in the background texture will be stripped.

Note: You can use a foreground texture that already has an alpha channel. In that case leave out the alpha texture. e.g.: "seeds", "", "dirt"

Case 3: Shard Texture

A shard texture works the same as a block texture, with the exception that alpha information in the background texture is not stripped.

However, you probably do not want to use some block texture as background texture but some handcrafted pattern. Have a look at the example pattern provided in the jar. The shard alpha texture will remove a good part of the pixels from the foreground, the background is nearly identical, but the non-transparent section is a bit bigger. This is the dark border you'll see in-game.

Adding your own Textures

To add your own PNG files as textures, you need to add your own texture pack. Put the PNGs in like any other vanilla (or mod) texture but with a unique name. You can then specify that name in OreShards' config.

You can add your textures into OreShards' JAR file if you distribute it as part of a pack. But please rename the jar to make clear that it has been changed.