Custom Icons

Magic supports "custom icons" by way of using 1.8 player skulls. (NOTE: This is no longer true, recent version of Magic use RP items instead of player skulls, but this information may still be useful)

In order for these to work properly, you must be using the Magic resource pack, or at least this specific part of it.

This changes skull items when held in an inventory from this:

to this:

Note, in particular, that normal player skulls will be affected, too, so that is a consolation you will have to make to use custom icons.

Otherwise, your wand inventory will look like this:

Making spells basically unreadable. If you can not use a resource pack, I recommend setting "url_icons_enabled: false" in your config.yml to turn off the custom icons.

Customizing

Note: This method no longer works reliably, Mojang has deprecated the skins.mojang API See the below section on Advanced Skin Retrieval

A spell or wand can use any Minecraft skin as an icon texture. The icon will be the front of the head, though all sides of the head are visible when a spell item is held in a player's hand.

You can use an online database of heads to find one you like, such as [http://heads.freshcoal.com](Minecraft heads). You can also browse the collection of textures made specifically for Magic here.

If you want to make your own, you can via a relatively simple process:

1. Create a skin as you would normally for a player, making the head an 8x8 icon.
2. Download your current skin and keep it as a backup.
3. Upload your "spell skin" to your Minecraft account.
4. Check "http://skins.minecraft.net/MinecraftSkins/NathanWolf.png" (using your own username)
5. Once the skin image above changes to your spell icon (this may take some time!), record its URL- you should be redirected to an image like "http://textures.minecraft.net/texture/4a41b28f5f8bc079342b2f49d3b8b649e89b60754a3acbad681cdc86a5"
6. Re-upload your own skin to restore your sense of self.
7. Put the texture URL you recorded into your spells.yml config, under the "icon_url" property.

Advanced Skin Retrieval

The above routine might not work anymore, as skins.mojang now updates very rarely, if at all.

Fortunately, there is a way to get around this if you have a little tech know-how:

1. Get your UUID, if you don't know it already: https://api.mojang.com/users/profiles/minecraft/NathanWolf
2. Make a note of the "id" returned by the above, it never changes. It will look something like "4cb358ae719c442393c78769ce46e9c3" (no dashes and don't copy the quotes)
3. Note that API requests are heavily limited by Mojang, don't spam these links or you will get blocked. You may need to wait a minute or two before going to the next step.
4. Now look up your player profile using the UUID from above: https://sessionserver.mojang.com/session/minecraft/profile/4cb358ae719c442393c78769ce46e9c3
5. This should give you a block of JSON that looks like this:

{
"id":
"4cb358ae719c442393c78769ce46e9c3",
"name":
"NathanWolf",
"properties":
[
  {
    "name":
    "textures",
    "value":
"eyJ0aW1lc3RhbXAiOjE0MzA0OTMyNTIwNTMsInByb2ZpbGVJZCI6IjRjYjM1OGFlNzE5YzQ0MjM5M2M3ODc2OWNlNDZlOWMzIiwicHJvZmlsZU5hbWUiOiJOYXRoYW5Xb2xmIiwidGV4dHVyZXMiOnsiU0tJTiI6eyJ1cmwiOiJodHRwOi8vdGV4dHVyZXMubWluZWNyYWZ0Lm5ldC90ZXh0dXJlLzRhNDFiMjhmNWY4YmMwNzkzNDJiMmY0OWQzYjhiNjQ5ZTg5YjYwNzU0YTNhY2JhZDY4MWNkYzg2YTUifX19"
  }
]
}

6. Take that long blob of text in "value", all of it without the quotes, and copy+paste it to this website: https://www.base64decode.org

Click "DECODE" and you should see something like this (that's right- inside the base64-encoded string in the JSON is... more JSON! GG, Mojang)

{"timestamp":1430493252053,"profileId":"4cb358ae719c442393c78769ce46e9c3","profileName":"NathanWolf","textures":
{"SKIN":
{"url":"http://textures.minecraft.net/texture/4a41b28f5f8bc079342b2f49d3b8b649e89b60754a3acbad681cdc86a5"}
}}

7. Finally, you can see your new skin URL there in the "url" field. This tends to update instantly, much more quickly than the skins.mojang URL redirect.

Super-Advanced Scripted Skin Retrieval

As part of the de-iconing of Minecraft 1.8.4, I wrote some scripts to mass-update all the icons in Magic. If you have some PHP experience and are feeling adventurous, you can check out the scripts I used here:

https://github.com/elBukkit/MagicPlugin/tree/master/Magic/src/resource-pack/common/source

Steps to use these scripts:

1. Clone the Magic repository on github
2. Navigate to src/resource-pack/common/src
3. Put your new icons (8x8 images) in the source_images folder
4. Run "php makeicons.php" to convert your 8x8 icons into skins
5. Run "php uploadicons.php" to upload your new skins

Both scripts will skip skins that have already been processed. The image_map.yml file is used to track uploaded skins so they don't get re-uploaded. It is also what drives my global list of textures.. so if you feel like sharing, please send me your updated YML file! :)

The script will save and restore your original skin, but of course it's always a good idea to have a backup before running something like this.