Let’s talk about Minecraft. Whether you play it, your kids play it, you know some people who play it, you’ve somehow never even heard of it; I think we can all agree that it’s nice when a community in some way or another contributes to a good cause. Making Minecraft as suitable as possible to as many people as possible is what user StitchyYYT decided was needed. He made a texture pack dedicated to making Minecraft suitable for those with Protan Color Blindness, Deutan Color Blindness, Tritan Color Blindness, Monochrome Color Blindness, Dyslexia, Moderate Arachnophobia, and Tryphobia.

In order to understand why he did this, or what I’m even talking about, we need to understand textures. In Minecraft, the game is made up of pixel art that gets upscaled and then placed onto a cube, or several smaller cubes plopped together to create an object. These pixel art pieces (textures) are then moved into a folder in the game’s files. In an earlier version of Minecraft (the game updates over time to add new content and keep the game refreshing), they originally added texture packs, which were a way to change the game’s style. To create one of these files, you would open Minecraft, enter the versions folder, download the version of Minecraft you wish to edit the textures from, convert it into a .zip file, extract all, then delete the majority of the files apart from the textures folder, then open each individual texture within an editing software of some sort, and modify it as you wish. And at the end, just drag and drop it into your resource pack folder, and use it.

There’s also the question of why he did this? Well, you see, in Minecraft, due to the sheer amount of blocks and textures, it takes quite a while to do all of that work, resulting in re-sprites. A re-sprite is when a piece of art is recolored or slightly altered in order to save time making new stuff, which, to the average consumer, is fine. However, to color blind people, it’s much harder to differentiate different colors. And it becomes even more difficult when you have Monochrome Color Blindness where your only signal at what a color is or isn’t comes down to the precise saturation, which is automatically irrelevant considering that has nothing to do with hue, making it extremely difficult for people to differentiate stuff.

So, how does this texture pack counter it? With completely individual sprites. Each sword, food type, block, log, piece of dirt, it’s all unique. For example, in the base game, with the normal textures, the only difference between an iron and stone sword is the color of the blade, pommel, and guard. By making unique textures, players can memorize those textures, and know what they’re using and when. He’s shown some true dedication putting over 8 months into this texture pack, and making it as nice as possible. The pack style is sort of similar to a game like celest, embracing the warm tones, and high saturation.

I’d highly recommend using this pack due to how much work was put into it and how welcoming it feels. It’s just an overall wonderful texture pack, and a wonderful cause. You can download it at https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/texture-packs/faithless.

 My name is Zach, and I am 11 years old, I play a lot of minecraft, and I love technology.