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tutorial:concepts

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Essential Minecraft Concepts

This section was designed for beginners by a beginner, to help understand basic concepts and definitions that are sometimes missed or misunderstood. Some concepts relate to elements visible in game, others to used files or classes that are frequently used while modding.

Concept Description
Item Something you can hold in your hand, drop to the ground, place in inventory or store it in a container. It may be a tool or a block held in the hand before placing it.
Block The key component for anything you build in minecraft and has been placed in the world. A lot of blocks are cubes, but most things you place in the world are implemented as blocks, like a furnace. Some blocks don't even look much like a cube, like buttons, fences and doors, and yet they are still treated as blocks. It is important to note that a Block should be thought in code as the definition for a type of block, not the actual single block you see in game.
Blockstate Blockstates (often seen in code under the name 'state') a specific instance of a block placed in a specific position in the world. This is what you normally think as a block while playing.
Block Item The item form of a block, so that you can hold them in your hand, stack them and store them.
Living Entity Something alive and moving in the world, like players and mobs.
Entity An internal structure to hold state data. For example, BlockEntity for blocks or ItemEntity for items, and of course LivingEntities. Some other things are occasionally also implemented as entities, like projectiles, frames and paintings. For example, the information about a torch placed at a given position in the world being on or off is stored in the torch's entity.
Model The model is a set of descriptive data used to represent the structure of a block, item, living entity, etc. For example, an iron block or furnace would contain information to describe the shape and size of each of its faces, as well as information about where to find the texture(image) that is used to give a particular surface its unique look. Models are usually described in JSON files but can also be setup via Java code.
Texture These are the graphic images used to give surfaces their unique look. They are usually implemented as 16×16 pixel .PNG files.
Renderer While most mods make use blockstates and model JSON files plus .PNG textures to provide the full representation of blocks, items and entities and rely on the default rendering mechanism to show them in the world as you'd expect, there are situations when you will need more complex behaviors. In those cases you will need to create a custom renderer to achieve the desired result.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION Please correct errors if you notice them.

tutorial/concepts.1653332239.txt.gz · Last modified: 2022/05/23 18:57 by mehrcraft