Transparent Wiki

Minecraft draws most models with an alpha cutout: for each pixel of a texture the game asks one yes-or-no question — is this pixel opaque enough to draw? A pixel that passes is painted at full strength; a pixel that fails is thrown away completely. There is no in-between.

That is why a resource pack cannot normally make armour, an armour stand, a cape or a painting partly see-through. Painting a texture at half opacity does not produce a half-visible model; it produces the same solid model as before, because the alpha value is only ever used as a pass/fail test.

Transparent switches a small, specific set of models over to translucent rendering, where the alpha value is used to blend the model with whatever is behind it. From then on a texture painted at 40% opacity really is drawn at 40% opacity.

The mod is inert on its own. It adds no items, blocks, recipes, commands or screens, stores nothing in the world, and does nothing at all until a resource pack asks it to.

Each of these is a separate switch, and a pack turns on only the ones it needs:

Anything not listed here is untouched and keeps rendering exactly as the game normally does.

A pack opts in with one small file at assets/transparent/transparent.json:

{
  "armor_stand": true,
  "player_armor": true,
  "player_cape": true,
  "painting": true,
  "end_crystal": true,
  "end_crystal_beam": true,
  "beacon_beam": false
}

Every key is optional; anything left out keeps its default. The file is read whenever resource packs reload, so switching packs or pressing the reload key applies the change straight away — no restart needed.

When several packs are active, the switches are combined: if any enabled pack asks for an option, that option is on. That way a pack that only retextures paintings does not accidentally switch off the transparent armour a pack below it provides.

The file alone changes nothing visible. The pack also has to ship textures whose pixels are actually partly transparent — a normal fully-opaque texture stays fully opaque no matter what the switches say.

Work in an image editor that keeps a real alpha channel (PNG, not JPEG) and lower the opacity of the pixels you want to see through. A few practical points:

• Very faint pixels still disappear. Pixels below roughly 10% opacity are discarded, which keeps the outline of the model crisp. Stay above that if you want a pixel drawn at all.
• Both sides get drawn. Because the far side of a translucent model is now visible through the near side, the inside faces of armour and crystals show up. That is expected, and it is what makes glass-like armour read as hollow rather than flat.
• Contrast matters more than opacity. A texture at 40% opacity over a bright wall reads clearly; the same texture over a background of a similar colour can look like nothing changed.
• Test against several backgrounds. Sky, grass and a dark cave all give very different results for the same alpha value.

Transparent is a client-side mod: it changes how your own game draws these models and sends nothing to anyone else. Install it on the client, along with the API it lists as required, and load a resource pack that opts in.

On a multiplayer server nothing needs to be installed server-side, and other players see their own game normally — a pack that makes your armour see-through does not make it see-through for them unless they use the same setup.

Because the mod stores no data of its own, it can be added to and removed from an existing world freely. Removing it simply puts the cutout rendering back; any pack that relied on it will show its textures as fully solid again.

• If nothing looks different, check the two halves separately: is transparent.json present in an enabled pack, and do the textures actually have partial alpha?
• Turning an option off in the pack is the quickest way to compare before and after without uninstalling anything.
• Translucent models are sorted against each other as the game draws them, so two see-through objects overlapping can occasionally sort oddly at certain angles. Moving slightly resolves it.
• Item frames are drawn as block models rather than entity textures on current versions of the game, so they are outside what this mod can reach; a pack that sets an item-frame option will simply have it ignored.
• Shader packs replace large parts of the rendering pipeline themselves. Results with a shader pack loaded depend entirely on that shader pack.