Minecraft Forums

You weren't complaining in Beta 1.8 when your pickaxe didn't multiply one diamond ore into 4 diamonds, were you? So why are you complaining now when that ability is too hard to get?

Quote from Club559

Woot. Enchantments work. I'm 90% sure enchantments will be added in trading.

Quote from Club559

Yup, potions. Working fine.

Quote from RotomGuy

Try potions. The priest could sell them. I would love a Brewery Villager who sells potions, though.

Quote from bud467

HAHA! jipped

Quote from Rofang

While they would look pretty, as would tools from any number of other materials, I don't think there's justification for adding another set of tools. Four levels is plenty: crappy, less crappy, pretty good, and great (I'd argue gold is already one too many; it's still in the crappy category even if it does gather resources faster).

Quote from Pumpkins

People, really? Its not like you ALWAYS have to play minecraft at weekends, just go outside, get some fresh, don't smell in your chair on the PC talking about how you can't be without minecraft for ONE day. I mean really...

• A book may have no more than 50 pages.
• A single page of a book may have no more than 256 characters.
• A single page of a book may have no more than 13 lines of text.
• The title of a book can be no more than 16 characters.
• The author of a book is the username of its creator, or "Player" if you're in offline mode. It cannot be changed.
• You can paste text into books with Ctrl+V, unless there isn't enough room on the page for it.
• A book can contain special characters, such as the section sign (§). These characters must either be on your keyboard, or pasted in. Alt-codes do not work.
• Section sign formatting codes (e.g. "§f") work in books, allowing you to have colored or formatted text.
• You can use special characters in the title of a book, if they exist on your keyboard. You cannot paste text/characters or use alt-codes when writing a title.
• You can only edit the text on a page starting at the last character. This means, if you notice a typo at the top of the page, you must first backspace the whole page to fix it.
• Pages cannot be removed or rearranged.
• You cannot edit a book once it has been signed, and cannot give a name to an unsigned book. Unsigned books all show up as "Book and Quill" in the inventory, when you hover over them.
• As of recent snapshots, you cannot begin a line with spaces/indentations, and cannot begin a new line without having text on the current line. This makes it difficult to separate paragraphs.

Now, unfortunately different fonts are not as easy as formatting text. Again, it's not an actual hack, just a trick.

In the image above, you see "fullwidth characters" as they appear in Minecraft. You can convert ordinary text into fullwidth text with a converter such as this, and copy and paste it into Minecraft. There may be a dotted box with some letters at the start sometimes - if this happens, paste the text in Notepad first, go to the start of the text, and try deleting the invisible character that's hiding there - copying into Minecraft should work as normal now.

Note that the amount of fullwidth characters which fit on a single line is tricky to predict. I tried making a title page with them, but it was very hard to center because I could only have a few spaces before a line before it tried to take up more than one line. This will likely be easier once the game allows us to move the typing cursor around (hopefully it does, some day).

Custom fonts are possible with texture packs, but you need MCPatcher for them to work properly. The file containing full-width characters is "glyph_FF.png", in the "font" folder of minecraft.jar:

Here is an example of what a custom font texturepack with MCPatcher may look like:


Technically, you could have any number of custom fonts using texture packs (or at least 222, at any rate ), but any font except the fullwidth font would be much harder to work with, unless of course you made your own converter program.

The workaround is actually very simple, fortunately. Remember the formatting codes from above? The ones using the § sign? It turns out that, although formatting codes are invisible, they still tell Minecraft a line is not empty, and you can have spacing and newlines thanks to this.

I prefer the code "§r", because it only resets formatting (having no effect on unformatted text), but you can use whatever code you like. Whenever I want an indentation at the start of a paragraph, I insert "§r " (that's the format code, followed by 5 spaces - the forum may not display this correctly. You can use however many spaces you like, of course). Whenever I need a blank line, I simply put "§r" on the line, after which I can hit Enter and get a new line without any problems.

For example, the following text produces the page pictured below:

§r	A Comparison of
§r	§oThe Shining§0 and
§r 	§oEvent Horizon§0
§r
§r	 The science fiction horror film §oEvent Horizon§0 by Paul W.S. Anderson shares several similarities with Stanley Kubrick's §oThe Shining§0. They each incorporate

NBTedit isn't hard to use at all. Take the following steps when hacking any book (in singleplayer):

1. Have the book you wish to edit in your inventory. It can be a Book and Quill, or a signed book.


2. Exit your world. You do not need to exit Minecraft, just the world.


3. Start up NBTedit, click File -> Open, and find the level.dat of the world you were working in. Open this file.


4. In the main area of the NBTedit window, look inside the "data" entry. At the bottom of this, you will find a "Player" entry, if this is a singleplayer world. Within that, open the "Inventory" entry.


5. Entries in the inventory are unnamed, but you can still figure out what's what. Most normal items are packages listed as "4 entries". Books (editable or signed) and enchanted items are "5 entries".


6. To figure out what's a book you can edit, open up any "5 entries" you see. It should have an "id" of 386 for Book-and-Quill, or 387 for a signed book. The "tag" entry contains its data.


7. Edit the stuff inside the "tag" entry however you like. I explain the format in the next section, and also some specific hacks you can try.


8. Save your changes, and then go back into the world in Minecraft.

Note: if you want to make more changes after playing ingame a while, make sure you Save and Quit from the world again, and before making changes in NBTedit, File -> Reload. Again, File -> Save once you've made your changes. If you didn't Reload, your inventory/stats/etc. will get reverted to what they were the last time you made changes!

If the singleplayer instructions don't work for you, then follow the multiplayer server instructions below. This is because of changes in the recent snapshots - however, as of 12w22a, the singleplayer instructions above work normally again.

For multiplayer servers, if you are the admin, you should open a player file and edit that instead. Player files are in the "players" directory of your server's world folder. When opened, the player file will contain an "Inventory" entry at the top level - from this point, you can continue from Step 5 above. Note that the player should be logged out when you are editing their inventory!

The "tag" entry of a book has the following contents:

• "pages", a list of Strings.
• Any number of untitled String entries
• "author", a String entry which only exists for signed books.
• "title", a String entry which only exists for signed books.

Now, what does this all mean? What exactly can you hack?
Well, for starters, remember when I said a book cannot have any more than 50 pages? That's just because the game does not let you make more than 50 .
Books with more than 50 pages

If you select the "pages" entry, and click the New String button ("Tt"-like icon, in NBTedit's toolbar), or press Ctrl+8, it will add a new page to the book. As far as I know, there is no limit to the number of pages, and you can continue to edit them ingame:


They will still exist even after you sign the book.

Un-signing a book so you can edit it again
If you change a signed book's "id" from 387 to 386, it will become a Book-and-Quill again, and you can edit it freely ingame. Signing the book ingame will work again, as normal.

Rearranging/removing pages in a book
Select the page you wish to move or delete. You can move it with Edit -> Move Up or Edit -> Move Down, or Ctrl+Up or Ctrl+Down, to move the page to wherever you like. Pressing Delete on your keyboard deletes a page. Watch out! NBTedit doesn't have an Undo function!

Editing a page of a book freely / Having more than 256 characters in a page / Having a page longer than 13 lines

You can double-click a page to edit it freely. This means you can move your cursor to any part of the text to edit it. You can also highlight and copy the text into a text editor, for convenience.

Note: NBTedit won't accept text with normal carriage returns in it - this means you can't type something like this:
"this is one line
and this is another"
Hitting Enter in NBTedit will finish editing a page, and copying multi-line text from somewhere else into NBTedit will not work either. Instead, you have to use the Line Feed character, U+000A. Where can you get this character, you ask? Well, I can't paste it here, but you can open up a page where you hit Enter in Minecraft, and then select that text in NBTedit. Copy that text into Notepad, and find the exact location you hit Enter - if you move your text cursor across this spot with the arrow keys, it will seem to stop on an invisible extra character. If you hold shift when you move the cursor (again, using the arrow keys) across this character, you can highlight it, and copy/paste it to wherever you like. That means you can have 'Enter's using NBTedit; it's just annoyingly tricky :/

Now, as the title of this section implied, you can also have more than 256 characters in a page, and more than 13 lines as well. Just edit a page in NBTedit as normal - you don't have to do anything special. It turns out that neither NBTedit nor the game care how much text you've crammed in a page!



Note: if you don't want text to flow off the page, avoid having more than 15 lines. To not have your text covered by the next/previous page buttons, avoid having more than 14 lines.

Have a book title with more than 16 characters / Have formatting and colors in your book's title

If you have a signed book, it will have a "title" tag you can edit. When you edit it, it turns out it can have as many characters as you like, even though the game normally limits you to 16. I don't know if there's any actual limit to the length of a title, but if you have enough characters it will be too long to fit on the screen. Editing like this, you can also make a book's title blank, which the game also normally does not let you do.

In addition, remember when I said a book's title can't have characters copied into it, and can't have format codes because the section sign won't go in (even if you have it on your keyboard)? Using NBTedit, you can actually paste whatever you want into a book's title, and the format codes will all work as they normally do!

Note, however, that your title cannot be multi-line, even if you go through the trouble I mentioned in the "Editing a page of a book freely" section. If you try, you'll just see a dotted box with "LF" in it, where the new line would have started.

Changing a book's author / Having formats in the author's name
Similar to the previous section, you can modify the "author" tag of a signed book, and your changes will show up in-game. The author's name does not even have to be a valid player name, and can contain special characters, be blank, or include formatting codes (so yes, your author can have a colored name, or even flashing random characters ). Similar to the title, your author can not be in multiple lines.

Duplicate an entire book
Old method in spoiler:

(Old method by me)
Select the "5 entries" package that represents the book you want to duplicate. Edit -> Copy. Now, select "Inventory", and Edit -> Paste. Finally, change the "Slot" tag to a different number. If there is a free inventory spot you have, and you know its slot number, change it to that. If not, simply choose a slot that contains an item you don't mind losing. 35 is the highest number you should attempt to put a book in, and 0 is the lowest.

EDIT: Club559 came up with a much better method for duplicating books! Change the "Count" value for the book you wish to duplicate. Change it to the number of books you want. Ingame, the book will now be a stack with that many books, and you can split with right-clicking as normal. Each copy will have the full contents of the book!