Building

GUIs

A GUI asset reskins one of Minecraft's screens: the chest window, the furnace, the anvil, the enchanting table. You draw a 256×256 sheet with the screen's window sitting in the middle of it, and that sheet draws over the screen when it opens.

How it actually works#

This one is worth understanding, because it isn't a texture override and the difference shows up everywhere else.

The sheet ships as a font glyph, and a plugin opens the screen with a title made of two invisible characters: a negative-space character that walks the cursor back to the window's top-left, then the glyph itself. Minecraft draws the title, the title happens to be your entire image, and it lands exactly over the window.

Two consequences follow, and both are the point:

• Vanilla screens stay vanilla. The files under textures/gui/ are never touched, so an ordinary chest a player opens looks like an ordinary chest. Only a screen a plugin opens with your title gets the custom look.
• You can draw outside the window. The sheet is bigger than the window, and the margin renders too, so a banner, a border or a pair of hanging chains can overflow the frame. The dashed rectangle in the editor is where vanilla's window sits; everything outside it is yours.

Which screens#

The picker covers the screens whose title text actually renders, grouped by what they're for:

A few are missing on purpose. The beacon draws no title and the survival inventory can't be retitled, and with no title there's nowhere to put the overlay.

Making one#

GUIs are drawn rather than generated: you start from the real vanilla window art for the screen you picked, already centred in the sheet, and edit from there. There's no prompt box yet: the AI isn't capable of drawing a good screen, and we're working on it.

In the editor you get the vanilla backplate to draw over, the dashed window frame, and a guide box on every slot the screen has, so you can line a panel up with the grid instead of counting pixels. The player inventory and hotbar draw at a fixed offset below the window on most screens, and they're guided too.

Seeing it in game#

The GUI's page carries the exact command that opens it, plus an Open in-game button that runs it for you in game:

/gui @p chest_54 \ue000\ue001

Those last two characters are this GUI's own: the negative-space one, then the glyph. They're allocated per pack, so copy the command off the page rather than typing it.

That's our plugin's command, and it's runnable by any player rather than being op-only, so the person who just drew the sheet can look at it. The screen it opens is a real one, so you're judging the art against real slots and real item stacks.

Exporting#

The sheet leaves as a PNG under assets/minecraft/textures/font/, plus an entry in the pack's font provider that binds it to its character. There's no gui/ file in the export, which is what keeps ordinary screens ordinary.

The half that isn't in the pack is the title. Your own plugin has to open the inventory with that exact string, in white, or the overlay never appears:

// The title is copied from the GUI's page in the Studio.
Inventory inv = Bukkit.createInventory(null, 54, Component.text("\ue000\ue001").color(NamedTextColor.WHITE));
player.openInventory(inv);

White matters, because the glyph is drawn in the title's colour and a coloured title tints your whole overlay.

On Bedrock#

None of this crosses over. Bedrock's screens aren't drawn from a Java font provider, and there's no title trick to exploit, so a GUI is Java-only. The rest of your pack converts as normal.