Premise

Time to play around with the Minecraft splash screen!!

I found this tutorial on PlanetMinecraft.com which is good at detailing the small, finicky nuances of creating a resource pack to change the Minecraft splash screen. HOWEVER, I found that a lot of the details written there were unclear and slightly overkill.

Also reverse-engineering any of the Menu Panoramas from Vanilla Tweaks revealed everything needed for the file structure of the final images.

Plus, as I run mainly on a self-hosted Spigot server, the actual commands to perform perfectly-aligned teleports did not work. So here I will create a simple step-by-step tutorial.

The Idea

• Create 6 square images that can be stitched together in a psuedo-spherical panorama.
  • South
  • West
  • North
  • East
  • Straight Up from South
  • Straight Down from South
• FOV must be set so that image edges blend together perfectly.
• Minecraft must run in windowed mode, ideally in a square at 1027×1027 resolution or re-scaled after the fact to this output image size.

Caveats

• Especially if run manually, it takes time to take six screenshots at six specific angles, meaning clouds and the day-night cycle will shift.
• If FOV is off or the view is shifted after teleporting, the image edges will be misaligned.
• An especially high render distance may not load immediately after teleporting, meaning partial builds further away may be janky and half-rendered on one side.
• I run on Spigot for Minecraft 1.18, which dramatically changes the teleport and requires more complicated /execute as commands.
• I’m assuming a basic resource pack with pack.png and pack.mcmeta properly configured for your version of Minecraft is already known.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Open Minecraft. In Settings configure to Windowed mode.
2. Open the screenshots folder in the file explorer.
3. Take a screenshot using F2 in Minecraft. Click the output .png in the file explorer and check file properties for output resolution.
4. Carefully adjust the window size and take screenshots until the output resolution of said screenshots are as close to 1027×1027 as possible. If the monitor resolution is too small to accomodate this, simply expand the window to the screen height available, then adjust the width until the output screenshot is perfectly square.
5. In Minecraft Options, adjust FOV to 90.
6. In Minecraft Options > Video Settings > Details, set clouds to Off.
7. Enable cheats/commands if not already (in Singleplayer, open to LAN, and in Multiplayer, /op yourself from the server console).
8. Run /gamerule doDaylightCycle false
9. F1 to turn off the interface. Make sure the F3 debug screen is also off.
10. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 0 0
11. Without touching the mouse, take a screenshot with F2.
12. In the screenshots folder, rename the new image to “panorama_0.png”.
13. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 90 0
14. Take a screenshot and rename the new image to “panorama_1.png”.
15. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 180 0
16. Take a screenshot and rename the new image to “panorama_2.png”.
17. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 270 0
18. Take a screenshot and rename the new image to “panorama_3.png”.
19. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 0 -90
20. Take a screenshot and rename the new image to “panorama_4.png”.
21. Run /execute as @p at @s run teleport @s ~ ~ ~ 0 90
22. Take a screenshot and rename the new image to “panorama_5.png”.

The rest is easy:

1. If necessary, resize all six images to 1027×1027 (VanillaTweaks stores images at this size, and upscaling from the PlanetMinecraft tutorial of 1024×1024 caused some noticeable blurriness once rendered).
2. If you don’t want an overlay haze, such as the ones VT packs with theirs, create a fully transparent 16×128 image called “panorama_overlay.png”. You MAY also be able to simply omit this completely from the resource pack file structure.
3. ZIP all six (or seven) png files along with the metadata into the following folder structure:

pack.mcmeta
pack.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_0.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_1.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_2.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_3.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_4.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_5.png
assets/minecraft/textures/gui/title/background/panorama_overlay.png

Copy the new resource pack to .minecraft/resourcepacks/ and enable it within the game, then exit to the title screen to observe the new rotating imagery of awesomeness!