New Add-Ons features in 1.0!

Greetings Ender Conquestors! Have you explored the mysterious End Ships? Have you looted the new Elytra? Have you battled the Enderdragon? With all these new features to try, we wonder whether you’ve been too distracted to notice the new Add-Ons features that are now available. Now creators have access to World Templates and Add-On Packages – read on for an explanation, some developer tips, and a look at what’s coming next!

New goodies!

World Templates

Version 1.0 ships with the “Festive Mash-Up 2016” world template. But you can also import your own (such as this Spleef template I’ve imported).

Add-On Packages

These are a way to distribute multiple individual Add-On packs at once. A common case is to include a world template, a resource pack, and a behavior pack. Add-Ons are represented by an mcaddon file. You can create an Add-On package by creating a zip containing any combination of mcpack and mcworld files.

Tips for Developers

Errors and warnings

We’ve added a “pack validation” screen in 1.0 to make it easier for you to catch Add-Ons mistakes. When you import an invalid pack (or one with warnings) you can click on the import completed toast to launch the validation screen:

Developers are likely to be working with packs that are not zipped up (because they’re still changing them on disk). For these, you can navigate to the validation screen by locating an invalid pack in the resource packs, behavior packs, or world templates UI. Invalid packs will display a black X icon and will be at the bottom of the list of available packs. Packs with warnings will show an informational icon (after you click once), like this:

And when you click that you’ll get a list of warnings (see example below). These warnings aren’t showstoppers, but they may cause problems with future updates. Fixing issues noted by warnings will keep your packs future-proof.

You may also see errors on this screen, marked in red. They indicate that the pack will not work. Presently, the only validations we have are from parsing the pack_manifest.json file. In the future, we’ll also provide other validations such as testing that images and sounds can be loaded as well as entity JSON is valid.

If you fix a warning on disk, you can hit the reload icon and the validation will be re-run. This is a great way to quickly iterate and ensure that your pack will be warning free for players.

Creating World Templates

The easiest way to create a world template is to use Windows 10 Edition to export an mcworld (or obtain one by any other means) and then add a pack_manifest.json to indicate it’s a template. Here’s an example manifest from the Festive Mash-up 2016 world template:

The pack_id and uuid need to be unique. You can generate them with various tools including this web site: https://www.uuidgenerator.net. If you’re familiar with resource and behavior packs, you’ll recognize the format. The important point here is the module with type world_template.

Creating Add-On Packages

As mentioned above, creating an mcaddon package is a great way to distribute your Add-Ons. All you need to do is zip up a series of mcpack and/or mcworld files and rename the resultant .zip to .mcaddon.

What’s Coming Next?

While we can’t promise in what order we’ll do these things or what the release date will be, here’s a list of some of the features that are on our minds for future releases:

• Sound and music in resource packs
• More capabilities for entity behaviors: e.g. customizable entity movement, animation, and spawn rules.
• Debuggability enhancements: Better warnings for invalid packs, ability to see entity state in game.