The resource system

Verified against Minecraft 26.2 · Part II · A player presses F3+T, the screen goes to the logo and a bar, and every texture, model, sound and font is rebuilt from a stack of packs without the game stopping.

A player presses F3+T. The screen goes red, the Mojang Studios logo comes up, and a white bar creeps across under it while the old world keeps rendering behind. What is happening is one pipeline that everything the game reads from a file goes through — textures, models, sounds, language strings, recipes, advancements, loot tables, tags, worldgen JSON: a stack of packs is discovered, merged into a resource manager that is a snapshot of the stack, and a list of reload listeners each rebuild their world from it, every one of them reading on the shared worker pool at once (anatomy) and swapping their live state on the owning thread in the order they were registered. The client’s stack is resource packs (PackType.CLIENT_RESOURCES, the assets tree); the server’s is data packs (PackType.SERVER_DATA, the data tree) — same classes, two instances, two directories, and /reload is the same pipeline run by the server. The surprising part is the end. A reload that fails does not find the offending pack. Minecraft.rollbackResourcePacks deselects every resource pack, clears the options lists, saves, and reloads again — and if vanilla was the only selected pack it rethrows and crashes instead.

The cast

The pipeline

flowchart LR
    D["discover: PackRepository.reload re-runs every RepositorySource and rebuilds the selection"] --> S["snapshot: a new MultiPackResourceManager over the opened packs, a snapshot of the list, not of the bytes"]
    S --> P["prepare: every listener reads on the worker pool at once"]
    P --> A["apply: each listener swaps its live state on the owning thread, in registration order, behind a PreparationBarrier"]
    A --> F["finish: checkExceptions, then the level re-extracted or the server's managers installed"]
    A --> R["roll back: every pack deselected, the reload run again"]

Five stages, and the rest of the page is one section per stage: what comes in, what is decided, what goes out. F3+T is the grounding trace; /reload is the coda, as a table of where the server’s run of the same pipeline differs.

Discover: the repository and its packs

What comes in is a set of RepositorySources (server/packs/repository), each a place packs are found. ClientPackSource and ServerPacksSource are the built-ins, both extending BuiltInPackSource, which also lists the packs bundled inside the vanilla pack — the art packs, the accessibility packs and every feature pack (BuiltInPackSource.TESTS_ID is declared and referenced nowhere, so the tests pack is a development leftover); FolderRepositorySource is a directory of user packs; DownloadedPackSource is server-sent packs, client only. PackRepository.reload re-runs every source into the available map and then rebuilds the selected list: prior choices are kept, and a pack whose Pack.isRequired is true is force-inserted at its Pack.getDefaultPosition. Reading the order out of options.txt is a startup step — Options.loadSelectedResourcePacks runs once in the Minecraft constructor, not on every F3+T.

A Pack is a discoverable pack: a PackLocationInfo (id, title, PackSource, optional KnownPack), a Pack.ResourcesSupplier that can open it, its Pack.Metadata (description, PackCompatibility, requested feature flags, overlays) and a PackSelectionConfig — required, default Pack.Position, fixed. Pack.Position owns the insertion algorithm that makes a fixed pack stick: Pack.Position.BOTTOM inserts at the front of the list, past any pack already fixed there, and Pack.Position.TOP at the back. The last pack in the list wins (next section), which is why vanilla is BOTTOM and why “higher in the UI” means “later in the list”. The client’s vanilla pack cannot be deselected and the server’s can: ClientPackSource marks vanilla required and bottom; ServerPacksSource marks it bottom but optional.

What a pack is on disk is PackResources (server/packs): the raw file source with PackResources.getResource, PackResources.listResources and PackResources.getNamespaces. VanillaPackResources is the jar’s own assets and data; FilePackResources a zip; PathPackResources a directory; CompositePackResources a pack plus its overlays subdirectories, which the Pack.ResourcesSupplier assembles for zip and folder packs (the vanilla pack never produces one). Discovery is guarded: DirectoryValidator, ForbiddenSymlinkInfo and PackDetector decide what a folder is allowed to be, allowed_symlinks.txt is parsed into a DirectoryValidator by LevelStorageSource.parseValidator. Two corners of server/packs are worth a sentence each. packs/linkfs is a synthetic read-only file system — LinkFileSystem, LinkFSProvider and a LinkFSPath that is a name in a tree rather than a name on disk — which lets a development checkout’s scattered directories present as one pack root, so the game can open a pack that was never assembled. And DownloadQueue is the client’s cache for server-sent packs: one directory per pack UUID under a cache root, downloads run one at a time on a ConsecutiveExecutor over Util.nonCriticalIoPool, every attempt appended to a JsonEventLog beside them, and the constructor calls DownloadCacheCleaner.vacuumCacheDir to trim the root to DownloadQueue.MAX_KEPT_PACKS — twenty files, newest kept, one per directory before any directory’s second. A server you visited twenty packs ago has been evicted.

What pack.mcmeta says

The file is read as ResourceMetadata sections: PackMetadataSection (description and a PackFormat range), FeatureFlagsMetadataSection, OverlayMetadataSection, ResourceFilterSection. Compatibility is a range, not a number. PackMetadataSection carries an inclusive range of PackFormat major/minor pairs and PackCompatibility reports too old, too new, unknown or compatible against the game’s own — resource 88.0 and data 107.1 in 26.2. Above PackFormat.lastPreMinorVersion (64 for assets, 81 for data) the min_format / max_format fields are mandatory and the old integer pack_format is not enough. A pack.mcmeta the strict codec rejects gets one more chance through a description-only fallback so the pack can at least be listed as incompatible. Overlays are versioned sub-packs: OverlayMetadataSection maps a PackFormat range to an overlays subdirectory that CompositePackResources layers on top of the pack itself, so one zip can carry variants for several game versions.

Feature flags are packs, but not auto-selected ones. A feature pack is a built-in pack carrying a FeatureFlagsMetadataSection, and its PackSource deliberately reports that it must not be added automatically. MinecraftServer.enableForcedFeaturePacks force-selects the ones matching the world’s forced features, and the world’s flag set is the selected packs’ requested flags joined with those forced ones. Turning on an experiment is enabling a data pack — through a different door than ordinary packs use. What the resulting FeatureFlagSet then gates is a registry lookup, and that is identifiers and registries.

What goes out of the stage is PackRepository.openAllSelected: the selected Packs opened into a list of PackResources, in order.

Snapshot: the manager

MultiPackResourceManager (server/packs/resources) is built from that list. It is a snapshot of the pack list, not of the bytes: it asks each pack for its namespaces and builds one FallbackResourceManager per namespace, each a stack searched from the last selected pack down. The old world stays up until the last apply, but the old files do not: on the client, ReloadableResourceManager.createReload closes the previous MultiPackResourceManager — with every file handle it held — before building the new one. What is frozen is which packs are in the stack; a Resource still opens its file when it is read, so a folder pack edited on disk mid-reload is observable. A zip is not: FilePackResources holds its zip open for the life of the pack.

A Resource is what a lookup returns: its source pack, an IoSupplier for the bytes — opened lazily, at read time — and a lazily-read ResourceMetadata found beside it. A .mcmeta is looked for in the winning pack or those above it, never in one below, so a pack overriding a texture without its .mcmeta loses the animation. ResourceFilterSection lets a pack hide lower packs’ files by pattern without providing replacements: MultiPackResourceManager reads each pack’s filter section and pushes it onto the namespace stacks as a filter, and a lookup that reaches a filtered entry stops there. Some loaders want every copy, not the winner: ResourceManager.getResourceStack and ResourceManager.listResourceStacks return all packs’ copies bottom-first, which is how languages, tags and atlas sources merge instead of overriding.

Two more managers frame this one. ReloadableResourceManager is the long-lived client façade that holds the current snapshot and the PreparableReloadListener list; the server has no façade — each reload is a fresh MultiPackResourceManager inside MinecraftServer.ReloadableResources. ResourceManager.Empty is the do-nothing manager handed to code that must run without packs.

What goes out is one ResourceManager, wrapped in a PreparableReloadListener.SharedState, and a ReloadInstance that has already started.

Prepare: every listener at once

A PreparableReloadListener.reload takes the shared state (which carries the ResourceManager), a background executor, a PreparableReloadListener.PreparationBarrier and a main-thread executor. SimplePreparableReloadListener splits that into SimplePreparableReloadListener.prepare (background) and SimplePreparableReloadListener.apply (main thread); SimpleJsonResourceReloadListener is the “every JSON file in a directory through one codec” specialisation, using FileToIdConverter to map data/ns/recipe/foo.json to ns:foo; ResourceManagerReloadListener is the apply-only shape.

SimpleReloadInstance is the schedule, and this is what it does, read from SimpleReloadInstance.prepareTasks. It wraps both executors in counters. It calls PreparableReloadListener.prepareSharedState on every listener first, synchronously. Then it walks the listener list once, calling each listener’s PreparableReloadListener.reload and handing it a barrier chained to the previous listener’s returned future (the first listener’s barrier is chained to the initial task). The barrier’s PreparableReloadListener.PreparationBarrier.wait does two things: it posts a task to the main-thread executor that removes the listener from the set still preparing and completes the all-preparations future when that set empties, and it returns that future combined with the previous listener’s. So listener N’s apply runs only after every listener has reached its barrier and listener N−1 has finished entirely — apply included — and a listener that never reaches its barrier holds every apply behind it. The futures are sequenced fail-fast: the first listener to throw fails the reload as a whole. It does not stop the others — Util.sequenceFailFast completes the outer future exceptionally and leaves every prepare running; Util.sequenceFailFastAndCancel, which would cancel them, is not the one used here. What never happens is the applies.

flowchart LR
    subgraph PREP["prepare, on the worker pool, all at once"]
        TMp["TextureManager: read every ReloadableTexture"]
        AMp["AtlasManager: stitch every atlas, completing the futures published under PENDING_STITCH"]
        MMp["ModelManager: load models and block states, then join the block and item stitches from PENDING_STITCH"]
    end
    ALL["all preparations: every listener has reached its barrier"]
    TMp --> ALL
    AMp --> ALL
    MMp --> ALL
    AMp -. "shared state" .-> MMp
    subgraph APP["apply, on the owning thread, in registration order"]
        TMa["TextureManager apply: swap texture contents"]
        AMa["AtlasManager apply: upload the atlases"]
        MMa["ModelManager apply: install the baked models"]
    end
    ALL --> TMa
    ALL --> AMa
    ALL --> MMa
    TMa --> AMa
    AMa --> MMa

Three of the client’s twenty listeners, the ones registered between them elided. Every apply waits on the all-preparations node; each apply also waits on the apply before it; and the one dotted edge is the only way one listener’s prepare depends on another’s.

The shared-state channel

PreparableReloadListener.prepareSharedState is a separate first pass for a reason: it is the one place a listener can publish something for another listener’s prepare to consume, keyed by a PreparableReloadListener.StateKey. The game declares exactly one — AtlasManager.PENDING_STITCH. AtlasManager publishes a future per atlas there before any prepare starts; ModelManager and ParticleResources pull the pending sprite futures out of it and join them inside their own prepare, so model baking overlaps atlas stitching rather than queueing behind it. This is why the model/atlas dependency is not an apply-order dependency, and why reasoning about it from the registration list gets the wrong answer. Which thread runs that first pass depends on who started the reload: the Render thread on the client, but a worker on the server, because the server’s reload instance is created from inside an already-async chain.

Prepare never touches live state. That is the whole contract, and it is one-directional: a listener that reads from the manager in SimplePreparableReloadListener.apply is reading the new snapshot and that is fine (TextureManager does exactly this, from its own PreparableReloadListener.reload), while one that mutates live state in SimplePreparableReloadListener.prepare is racing the Render thread. Nothing a listener owns is torn down when a reload starts; the client keeps rendering with the old atlases while the new ones bake.

Apply: registration order

Registration order is apply order. The client registers, in order, LanguageManager, TextureManager, ShaderManager, SoundManager, AtlasManager, FontManager, the three colour listeners (GrassColorReloadListener, FoliageColorReloadListener, DryFoliageColorReloadListener), ModelManager, EquipmentAssetManager, EntityRenderDispatcher, BlockEntityRenderDispatcher, ParticleResources, LevelExtractor, the cloud renderer, GpuWarnlistManager, a PeriodicNotificationManager, then SplashManager from Gui and WaypointStyleManager from Hud — twenty in all. On the client ReloadableResourceManager.createReload is called with Util.backgroundExecutor (named resourceLoad) and Minecraft itself as the main-thread executor, so apply runs on the Render thread, interleaved with frames. On the server ReloadableServerResources.loadResources is called with Util.backgroundExecutor and MinecraftServer, so apply runs on the Server thread.

The counters SimpleReloadInstance wrapped the executors in are where the progress bar’s numbers come from: ReloadInstance.getActualProgress weighs prepare and apply tasks double and listeners-completed single, and the overlay smooths it.

Finish, or roll back

On the client LoadingOverlay is a poll. It draws the logo from the vanilla pack outside the reload (via VanillaPackResources.asProvider) and a smoothed bar from ReloadInstance.getActualProgress; a manual reload fades it in over half a second and it will not fade out until a full second has passed. Each tick, once ReloadInstance.isDone, it calls ReloadInstance.checkExceptions and hands the result to its finish callback. Success runs LevelExtractor.allChanged, which is why every chunk section rebuilds after F3+T, then ResourceLoadStateTracker.finishReload, DownloadedPackSource.onReloadSuccess and Minecraft.onResourceLoadFinished. Failure runs Minecraft.rollbackResourcePacks, which does not find the offending pack — it deselects every resource pack, clears the options lists, saves, and reloads again, and if vanilla was the only selected pack it rethrows and crashes instead. That recovery reload bypasses the one-at-a-time guard, skips the fade, and if it fails the client abandons recovery: Minecraft.abortResourcePackRecovery drops the overlay, disconnects any level and returns to the title screen with a failure toast. ShaderManager is constructed with Minecraft.triggerResourcePackRecovery for exactly this, so a shader that fails at runtime rather than at load takes the same road. Throughout, ResourceLoadStateTracker records what kind of reload this was and with which packs, so a crash report can say.

On the server there is no overlay; the finish is a continuation on the server thread, and the coda below lists it.

F3+T, end to end

sequenceDiagram
    participant KH as KeyboardHandler
    participant MC as Minecraft
    participant PR as PackRepository
    participant RRM as ReloadableResourceManager
    participant SRI as SimpleReloadInstance
    participant Worker as Worker
    participant LO as LoadingOverlay

    KH->>MC: handleDebugKeys matches keyDebugReloadResourcePacks, reloadResourcePacks
    MC->>PR: reload, then openAllSelected: rediscover, keep the selection, open it
    MC->>RRM: createReload: close the old MultiPackResourceManager, build the new snapshot
    MC->>LO: setOverlay, in the same statement: logo and a smoothed bar from getActualProgress
    RRM->>SRI: create: prepareSharedState on every listener, then reload on each, in order
    SRI->>Worker: every listener's prepare, all at once
    Worker-->>MC: each barrier resolved on the Render thread once every prepare is in and the previous listener has applied
    MC->>MC: apply, one listener per registration slot, between frames
    Note over LO: a later tick
    LO->>MC: isDone, checkExceptions, then allChanged on success or rollbackResourcePacks on failure

The key does nothing but ask. KeyboardHandler.handleDebugKeys matches Options.keyDebugReloadResourcePacks and calls Minecraft.reloadResourcePacks. If a reload is already showing an overlay, the request is parked in Minecraft.pendingReload and drained from Minecraft.runTick, and a second request while one is parked simply returns the same future. The one path that bypasses the guard is a recovery reload after a failure. The rest is the five stages above: PackRepository.reload and PackRepository.openAllSelected on the Render thread, ReloadableResourceManager.createReload closing the old snapshot and building the new one, SimpleReloadInstance fanning prepares out to the resourceLoad pool and marshalling applies back through Minecraft, and LoadingOverlay.tick polling for the end.

The first reload of the game’s life runs the same way from the Minecraft constructor, tagged ResourceLoadStateTracker.ReloadReason.INITIAL rather than manual; a world being opened builds its own first snapshot through WorldLoader.load, whose WorldLoader.PackConfig.createResourceManager runs MinecraftServer.configurePackRepository and opens the packs; and a server-sent pack is just one more RepositorySource, so DownloadedPackSource triggers an ordinary Minecraft.reloadResourcePacks.

/reload, the same pipeline on the server

Two of those rows are worth a second look. The command tree is rebuilt by every /reload — a new Commands inside the new ReloadableServerResources — but nothing re-sends it, so connected clients complete against the tree they were given until they reconnect. And the reload is debug-timed only: the “Resource reload finished after N ms” line, the per-listener timings and the total-blocking-time figure all come from ProfiledReloadInstance, selected only when the logger is at debug.

Across the wire

A server pushes a pack with ClientboundResourcePackPushPacket (id, URL, hash, required, prompt) and withdraws one with ClientboundResourcePackPopPacket, sent by ServerResourcePackConfigurationTask in the configuration phase and by ServerPackCommand (/serverpack push|pop) at any time in play; the client answers with a ServerboundResourcePackPacket and its ServerboundResourcePackPacket.Action. Packs are keyed by UUID and stack, and a server-sent pack pins itself to the top of the selection. ServerCommonPacketListenerImpl.handleResourcePackResponse disconnects a client that declines — but the “required” it consults is MinecraftServer.isResourcePackRequired, a server-wide server.properties setting, not the flag on the individual pack, so a declined /serverpack push can disconnect you on a server whose properties pack is required.

The system is data-driven by pack.mcmeta (PackMetadataSection, with min_format / max_format replacing the integer pack_format), options.txt (Options.resourcePacks), level.dat’s WorldDataConfiguration (DataPackConfig enabled/disabled plus the FeatureFlagSet), server.properties for the server-sent pack, and allowed_symlinks.txt via DirectoryValidator.

Questions players ask

Why does my pack’s animated texture stop animating when another pack overrides the image? Because the .mcmeta is looked for in the winning pack or those above it, never below. The override won the image and brought no metadata.

Why does a datapack I dropped into the folder appear after /reload but a resource pack I dropped in does not after F3+T? ReloadCommand.discoverNewPacks selects every newly available pack; PackRepository.reload on the client only re-discovers and keeps the selection you had.

Why did F3+T turn all my packs off? A listener threw. The rollback does not know which pack did it, so it clears them all and reloads with vanilla alone.

Why does /reload freeze the server? When it is issued from the server thread, MinecraftServer.reloadResources blocks that thread with BlockableEventLoop.managedBlock until the reload is done.

Why can I disable the vanilla data pack but not the vanilla resource pack? ClientPackSource marks it required; ServerPacksSource does not.

Where to look

PackType · PackResources · Pack · PackRepository · PackCompatibility · PackFormat · ServerPacksSource · ClientPackSource · BuiltInPackSource · FolderRepositorySource · MultiPackResourceManager · FallbackResourceManager · ReloadableResourceManager · PreparableReloadListener · SimplePreparableReloadListener · SimpleJsonResourceReloadListener · SimpleReloadInstance · ResourceLoadStateTracker · Minecraft.reloadResourcePacks · LoadingOverlay · ReloadCommand · MinecraftServer.reloadResources · ReloadableServerResources · WorldLoader · DownloadedPackSource · ServerPackManager

Rules: names, never code · how the system works, not how the code reads · newest version only · every backticked name passes tools/verify_names.py.