This week brought us the 0.16 release (also known as the Boss Update) for Minecraft Pocket Edition and Minecraft Windows 10 Edition Beta. In addition to some awesome new gameplay including underwater monuments and the wither, 0.16 includes Add Ons, which allow you to modify the way that mobs in the game look and behave. In this tutorial, I’ll walk through how to create a simple add on on my Windows 10 computer (you can create them on any computer and upload them to your Pocket Edition device directly but it’s a bit easier to use the Win10 Edition). I’m going to modify the bat mob to look like an owl. When I’m done, I’ll be able to add owls to my Minecraft world that look like this:

Want to skip ahead? Here’s the contents:

Download the Vanilla Files | Navigate to Local Worlds Folders | Create a New Resource Pack | Create the Texture | Create a New Behavior Pack | Modify the Size and Speed | Load the Resource and Behavior Packs

Step 1: Download the Vanilla Minecraft Files

So let’s get started by going to https://minecraft.net/en/addons/. Here you can download the two demo add on packs that were created by the Minecraft Team and SethBling but you can also download the json files for vanilla Minecraft. You can write these yourself from scratch but it’s a lot easier to start with these as a base. Unzip the .zip folder. You’ll need these shortly.

Step 2: Navigate to Your Local World’s Resources Folders

Next you’re going to want to start adding content Minecraft. Type ‘Run’ into the start menu then from the Run command prompt, type ‘appdata’

Click on the folder ‘Local’, then ‘Packages’. There’s a lot of content in here so search for the Minecraft folder which will look something like this:

In that folder, click ‘LocalState,’ then ‘games’ and finally ‘com.mojang.’ You should see the following folders:

Here, you can see the folder for behavior packs, which determine how mobs behave, as well as resource packs, which determine how they look.

Step 3: Create a New Resource Pack

Start by opening the folder ‘resource_packs.’ Unless you’ve created or downloaded a resource pack before, it’s probably empty. Create a new folder. For the sake of the test, I named mine owl_resources.

Now go back to the vanilla Minecraft files you downloaded from the website. Open the folder ‘vanilla’ then the folder called ‘client.’ You should see a list of files that looks like this:

Copy all of the contents of the folder, and paste them into your new resource pack.

Next you need to open up the json file called pack_manifest. The pack_manifest file is the information about the add on, including the name, the description and a unique identifier. You can open the json file with any text editor. I use Sublime but you can also use Notepad. When you’ve opened the file, you can edit the text inside quotations after ‘name:’ and ‘description:’ just like I did here:

You also need to change the pack_id and the uuid to something new. If you use the same IDs as vanilla Minecraft, the game won’t recognize your files as a brand new resource pack. You’ll have the same problem if you create two resource packs with the same IDs as each other. You can generate new UUIDs quickly and easily (and for free) at uuidgenerator.net. Generate two version 1 UUIDs and copy and paste them into your resource pack manifest. Save the manifest and you’ve created a new resource pack!

Step 4 – Create the Texture

Just because you have actually created a resource pack doesn’t mean it changes anything in the game yet. For now, I’m just going to change the texture of one of the mobs – the bat. Click into the ‘textures’ folder, then the ‘entity’ folder. Here are the image files that make up every mob type in the game. I opened up the image for the original bat mob which looks like this:

And edited the image to make the skin design for my owl, like this:

I save the updated texture (still titled bat.png) and closed the program. Now, I’ve got a resource pack, with a unique texture – when I apply the resource pack in the game, bats will look like (very small) owls!

Step 5 – Create a New Behavior Pack

Now my bat looks like an owl… but it’s still the same size as the original bat and it moves really fast, not like an owl would at all. I’d like to modify the bat’s behavior to make it twice as big and 1/5 the speed.

The first thing I need to do is navigate back to the com.mojang folder and then click on ‘behavior_packs.’ Just like the resource_packs folder, this should be empty unless I’ve created or loaded a behavior pack before. Create a new folder for your new behavior pack (I called mine ‘owl_behavior’).

Go back to your vanilla Minecraft files from the website and this time select the ‘server’ folder. You don’t need to copy over all of the contents of the folder this time, just the entities and and loot_table folder, and the pack_icon and pack_manifest, like this:

Copy and paste those files into your new behavior pack.

Just like before, we’re going to edit the pack_manifest. And just like before, we’re going to change the name, description and IDs. But this time there’s an additional step. There’s some extra information we need to remove from the file. We want to delete everything from “dependencies” to the “]”, as highlighted below:

Once that’s removed, you can go ahead and edit the title and descriptions in the manifest. Don’t forget to generate unique IDs from uuidgenerator.net. Here’s my final manifest:

Save that, and that’s the resource pack created!

Step 6 – Modify the Behavior

There is a ton you can do with behavior packs – everything from increasing the explosion radius of Creepers to making pigs fly and chickens rideable. But I’m going to make a very simple change to the bat to make it twice the size and 1/5 the speed of a vanilla bat.

To do that, I open the ‘entities’ folder, then click on the json file for the bat (conveniently named bat.json). The bat is a very simple mob so there’s not a lot here, but I’m going to add a couple of lines to get my desired outcome. First, I’m going to add some code to double the bat’s size by using the minecraft.scale component. Next I’m going to add a speed_multiplier of 0.2 (1/5) to the movement component. When I’m done, my code looks like this:

Once that’s saved, I should have a working behavior pack to accompany my working resource pack. Now I’m ready to apply them in the game!

Step 7 – Load the Resource and Behavior Packs in Minecraft

In the final step, I can open Minecraft Windows 10 Edition on my computer and create a new world. I’m going to set it to creative mode so that I can spawn bats to make sure my add ons worked.

Next, I want to scroll down the menu on the left hand side of the world creator and choose the option for ‘Resource Packs.’ If I’ve done everything correctly, I’ll see my new resource pack for the ‘Owl Add On’ there in the resources file list, and I simply need to click on it to apply it to the new world.

Finally, I can continue scrolling down the left hand menu to the ‘Behavior Packs’ option. Again, I should see my ‘Owl Behavior’ as an available pack, and I just need to click on it to apply it to my world.

I’m now ready to click the Create button and enter my world. Because I’m in creative mode, I can grab the egg to spawn a bat from the item menu.

When I spawn the bat, it should look like an owl, be twice as big as a normal bat, and 1/5 as fast… just like this!

If you want to download these packs yourself:

Download (.MCPack) (Behavior Pack)

Download (.MCPack) (Resource Pack)

Or, if you want a Minecraft world with these resource and behavior packs already applied, you can grab that here: Owl World.

You’ll need to spawn your own bats to see the “owls” in action thought :).

Have fun exploring Add Ons in Minecraft!

This guide was written by Meaghan Fitzgerald. Follow her on Twitter at @megfitz