HELLOOOOOOOO AGAIN!!!

welcome back to another episode of me fighting Minecraft’s rendering engine and somehow winning.

today’s victim:

index.

the mod where I thought:

“yeah, i’ll just color some chests”

and Minecraft replied:

“no ❤️”

anyway…

after many hours of staring at confusing renderer code, here are the things that happened. >w<

SO WHAT DID I ACTUALLY DO???

Chest colors are no longer just a pretty menu

The chest color screen is now connected to the actual game world.

When you pick a color and press apply, index stores that color for that specific chest position.

Meaning:

• chest A can be red
• chest B can be blue
• chest C can be whatever weird RGB combination you create at 2 AM

Every chest gets its own identity.

How does the coloring actually work?

This was the scary Minecraft part.

Instead of making a custom chest block (which would mean recreating a lot of vanilla behavior), index now hooks into Minecraft’s existing chest renderer.

The process is basically:

you pick a color
↓
ColorChestScreen saves it
↓
ChestColorManager remembers the position + color
↓
Minecraft starts rendering a chest
↓
index checks if that chest has a color
↓
the renderer applies the tint

So the chest is still a normal Minecraft chest.

The grayscale chest problem

Turns out Minecraft does not magically replace colors.

The tint system works by multiplying colors together.

So trying to color a normal brown chest gave some very questionable results.

The solution?

Make the chest texture grayscale.

Now Minecraft has a neutral base color that can actually be transformed into whatever color index wants.

RGB go brrrr.

A lot of behind-the-scenes work

Most of this update is invisible stuff:

• learning how Minecraft’s block entity rendering works
• dealing with render states
• connecting saved data with the rendering pipeline
• fighting mixins
• getting destroyed by method signatures
• fighting mixins again

classic modding experience.

SO… DOES IT WORK???

Mostly!!

The foundation is there.

The chest renderer now understands:

“this chest might have a custom color”

which is a huge step compared to before where the color picker was basically just a fancy RGB calculator.

WHAT’S NEXT???

Now that chests can finally have their own colors, it’s time for the actually useful features:

Chest searching

• scan chest contents
• compare items with the player’s search list
• know where your items are hiding

Chest indicators

• show which chests contain what you’re looking for
• make finding items faster

Better saving

• make colors survive restarts
• handle worlds and chunks properly

More polish

• improve the UI
• make everything feel more Minecraft-like

The menus are slowly turning into a real system.

Now it’s time to make index actually do the thing it was created for.

Finding stuff.

Because honestly…

opening 50 chests looking for one random item is pain.

Thank you for reading this extremely cool and long devlog!!

See you next time >w<