A HUD editor for Minecraft

A HUD overlay is text that happens to look like a picture. Which pixel it lands on depends on the surface it sits in - and those anchors are measured here, not estimated.

Seven surfaces, each with its own rules

The action bar sits 65 pixels above the bottom edge, the boss bar 10 below the top, the title is drawn at four times the scale and the subtitle at two. The sidebar is as wide as its widest line, so where a design lands there depends on what the rest of the scoreboard says.

All of that is in the editor as data, measured against a real client. The screen view puts every module where the player will see it, so you can judge the whole screen instead of one box at a time.

Animation, and what the client really does

A glyph does not animate by itself. The client reads a font texture once: there is no .mcmeta for it, no atlas, no frame counter. Anything that moves on a HUD moves because something sends the next frame.

So an animation here is a reel of poses on one surface, and the editor plays it in the preview while a Paper plugin plays it in game. How fast that may go is measured, not assumed: on the action bar, boss bar, title, subtitle and a sidebar line, every pose arrives - down to a single tick, with no fade and nothing swallowed.

What the editor refuses to pretend

Chat cannot be animated, and that is not a gap in the measurements: a new chat line stands below the old one instead of replacing it. The editor says so instead of letting you build something that will never move.

The same goes for a container title, which only changes when the window is reopened, and for a dialog, which is a file.

Where the numbers come from

Every anchor on this page comes from a calibration run: a pack with markers, a screenshot, and an evaluation that compares the measured position against the predicted one. Where a run has not happened, the editor marks the value as unverified rather than quietly using it.

The timing numbers come from a separate run that records the screen at 60 frames a second and counts how long each pose actually stood.

Questions

Can I move HUD text up or down?

Yes - the pack re-declares the vanilla font sheets at a different ascent, which is what makes text shiftable at all. The editor warns when that shift makes italic text drift sideways, because the client shears italics from the baseline.

Does a HUD design need a plugin?

To show it, something has to send the component - a plugin, a command block, a datapack. The pack alone teaches the client what the glyphs look like.