Tiny Item Animations Wiki

Tiny Item Animations adds motion to a part of Minecraft that has always been perfectly still. In an unmodified game an inventory slot is either empty or it holds a stack, and moving items between slots happens with no visual reaction at all: the item simply appears somewhere else on the next frame.

This mod puts a short burst of movement into that moment. When a stack is dropped onto a slot, the item in that slot swells briefly past the edge of its square and then settles back to its normal size. The stack riding on the cursor grows in the same way as soon as it is picked up. Nothing else changes: the same items end up in the same places, and the animation is purely something to look at.

The slot animation fires when a carried stack is put down onto a slot that already holds something. That slot's icon jumps to its largest size instantly and then shrinks back down over the following moments.

The shrink follows an ease-out curve rather than a straight line, which is what makes it read as a soft bounce instead of a mechanical resize: most of the size change happens in the first instant, then the last stretch settles gently. The item scales around the centre of its own square, so it grows outward in every direction and stays visually anchored to the slot it belongs to instead of drifting away from it.

Because each slot tracks its own progress independently, several slots can be part-way through the animation at once. Moving quickly across a row of slots leaves a short trail of icons at different sizes, all easing back to normal at their own pace.

The stack held on the cursor gets its own version of the effect. Picking a stack up starts its animation from zero, and the icon grows smoothly as it is carried, reaching full size and staying there while it follows the pointer.

The practical effect is that the item being carried is bigger than everything underneath it, which keeps it readable while it passes over a dense grid of other items. Like the slot animation, it scales around the item's own centre, so the enlarged icon stays exactly under the pointer rather than sliding off to one side.

Putting the stack down resets its progress, so the next pickup animates again from the beginning.

The animation is attached to the standard container screen that Minecraft builds all of its inventory windows from, rather than to any single menu. That means it shows up everywhere items are handled:

• the player inventory, including the armour slots, the crafting grid and the hotbar row
• chests, trapped chests, barrels, shulker boxes and ender chests
• furnaces, blast furnaces, smokers, brewing stands and other processing blocks
• crafting tables, anvils, grindstones, looms, smithing tables and cartography tables
• the inventory screens added by other mods, as long as they are built on the same standard screen

There is nothing to enable per screen and no list of supported containers to maintain.

Two values shape the effect, and both are adjustable from the config screen.

Animation speed controls how quickly the animation plays out. A low value stretches it into a slow, obvious swell that lingers on screen; a high value turns it into a quick flick that is barely more than a blink. The default sits in between, fast enough to feel responsive but slow enough to be seen.

Pickup scale controls how large the item becomes at the peak of the animation. A value close to normal size makes the effect a subtle nudge that registers without drawing attention; a larger value turns it into an exaggerated bounce where the icon spills well over the edges of its slot.

The two settings work together: a large scale with a fast speed gives a sharp pop, while a large scale with a slow speed gives a heavy, drawn-out swell.

The effect is drawn on top of the normal inventory and changes nothing underneath it. No items, blocks, recipes, entities or commands are added, no inventory rules are altered, and stack sizes, click behaviour and shift-clicking all work exactly as they did before.

Everything happens while the screen is being drawn, so nothing is written to the world and nothing is stored in a save. The mod can be added to an existing world or removed from one again with no trace left behind and no risk to the items already in storage.

It is also purely a visual layer on the player's own screen, so it has no effect on what anyone else sees.