Luminotype

Twenty-seven text effects for Minecraft — ten that colour, seventeen that move. Works on item names, lore, tooltips, chat, books, signs, and FTB Quests text.

Minecraft 1.20.1 · Forge 47.4.x · Client-side

What it does

Put a control code in front of any text.

&p流光彩虹 Rainbow
&xsh shaken text
&{grad from=5BCEFA to=F5A9B8}gradient&{/}

No resource pack, no dependencies. Drop the jar in mods/ and the codes work.

Two families

Ten colour codes, one letter each. They recolour, outline and add glow; the letters stay put.

Seventeen animated effects, &x plus two letters. They move, rotate and reveal.

Two letters are matched before one, so &xsh is shake rather than &xs followed by an h. One-letter shortcuts exist for the common ones: &xs &xw &xr &xu &xf &xg &xb &xp &xt &xc &xd &xh &xl &xi &xe.

Parameters

&{shake a=3 f=2}violent shake&{/}
&{grad from=ff0000 to=0000ff sp=8}red to blue&{/}
&{pulse base=0.2 f=3}strong pulse&{/}
&{typewriter f=5}fast typing&{/}

An unrecognised parameter name is ignored and the default used — a typo should not stop an item name from rendering.

Combining

&q&xsh          arcane shake
&{shake; wave a=0.5}both&{/}
&xsh shaken&r plain again
\&xsh literal code

&{/} closes a long-form scope. &r (or §r) clears every effect and vanilla formatting.

Where it works

Item names and lore, full tooltips, chat, books, signs — anything the game renders as a text component. With FTB Quests installed, quest titles, subtitles, descriptions and reward text too.

Optional compatibility

Detected at runtime, wired up only if present. None are required.

• FTB Quests / FTB Library — codes work in quest text, and a reflective API writes them into quest data from a script
• ModernUI — text keeps its correct font fallback instead of dropping to the default face

Scripting

Mod id luminotype, package cn.blockforge.luminotype.

const DynamicTextApi = Java.loadClass('cn.blockforge.luminotype.api.DynamicTextApi')
const FtbQuestTextApi = Java.loadClass('cn.blockforge.luminotype.compat.FtbQuestTextApi')

FtbQuestTextApi.setTitle('5A1B2C3D4E5F6071', '&u&xsh Red Overload')
DynamicTextApi.refresh()

Pass quest ids as strings — they are full 64-bit values and JavaScript numbers lose precision on them. Edit quest data during server-side script loading; clients parse the codes when the data syncs.

FtbQuestTextApi is fully reflective: with FTB Quests absent every method returns false rather than throwing, so it can be called unguarded.

Configuration

config/luminotype-client.toml, generated on first run.

Plus a switch per colour effect. compatibleScreens is a substring match against the lowercased screen class name, so ["inventory"] is enough. * matches everything; hud covers text drawn with no screen open.

Turning an effect off still hides its code — the text falls back to its plain colour rather than showing a literal &p.

Performance

Text with no control codes costs nothing: the parser scans once, finds no code, returns the original.

Of the animated effects, sixteen move or recolour a single glyph and cost about what a colour code does. &xne neon is the exception — it draws each glyph eleven times. Fine on a title, noticeable on a full page of lore.

Three levers: raise refreshIntervalMs, lower maxTextLength, narrow compatibleScreens.

Notes

&m is vanilla's strikethrough code. This mod claims it for Synthwave. Use §m for strikethrough. No other vanilla code conflicts.

&xsc scroll leaves its container — it pushes the whole line left. That is the effect, not a bug, but do not put it on an item name.

&xty typewriter is keyed by the string. The same text drawn in two places shares one reveal; different text keeps separate progress. Progress is forgotten a second after it stops being drawn, so a tooltip retypes on each hover.

Client-side rendering. The animation happens during font rendering, so a server does not need the mod — but control codes live in server-side data such as item NBT and quest files, and a player without the mod sees the literal code. For a modpack, require it on all clients.

Known limitations

&#RRGGBB custom colours are not supported. Writing one renders it literally. For an arbitrary two-colour gradient use &{grad from=… to=…}, which does work.