Creating texture packs

Texture packs are a simple folder containing image files named after the default ones.

The easiest way to create a texture pack is to copy the files from minetest_game to get the file names of all the default textures.

Create a new folder to hold your new texture pack.

Under Windows, browse to your Minetest folder, enter the games/minetest_game folder, then hit Ctrl+F to invoke the search function. In the search box, enter “*.png” to find all the image files (or directly use the “Images” option in the search page).

Under Linux, it’s better to use the terminal. These commands should do the job:

$ TP_NAME=your-pack-name
$ cd ~/your/path/to/minetest
$ mkdir textures/$TP_NAME
$ find games/minetest_game/ -name '*.png' -exec cp '{}' "textures/$TP_NAME" ';'

Next, open your favorite image editor and edit the images in your texture pack folder, or create the images from scratch and save them over the original files. Any image editor that supports transparency (also called “alpha” or “mask”) should be OK.

The textures may be any size, but square images whose size is a power of 2 (16×16, 32×32, 64×64, 128×128, etc.) is preferred.

To use textures for sun and moon put sun.png and moon.png in your texture pack folder.
If you want them to be available for all the texture packs (including default), you can put them in /textures/pack/base/
If you want textures to be tinted, tonemaps have to be provided (512x1 px) named sun_tonemap.png and moon_tonemap.png

Once you are finished creating your pack, compress the folder (not only the files inside) in a Zip archive, upload to the Web] (Mediafire and Dropbox are popular choices), and post your announcement to the Texture Packs forum.