Coloured Minecraft user interface strings

Creates colourful strings in Minecraft, for all languages. Useful for changing GUI text colour, etc.

Requires JRE 25 or JDK 23+ with --enable-preview.

Simply drop it into the input folder and execute it with java colouredText.java to generate coloured language files to include in a resource pack. The script is without dependencies and only needs an adequate Java version to run it. The output directory will default to lang (created automatically) in the input directory.

Input directory structure

│ input directory:
│   - assets:
│     - indexes: ...
│     - objects: ...
│   en_us.json
│   colours.yaml

The assets folder is optional. It's required to generate colours for languages other than the default: US English. Copy it from the .minecraft folder.

en_us.json is required. It's Minecraft's default language file, and is bundled inside the Minecraft jar at /assets/minecraft/lang/.

colours.yaml is the colour scheme mapping language file strings to colours.

Example colour scheme:

ALL: BLUE # Makes every string blue. Probably a bit excess. You should probably omit this.
ALL container : WHITE # Makes every string key starting with 'container.' white.
ALL commands.worldborder : white  # Case is not significant
ALL subtitles.entity: Yellow
subtitles.entity.parrot: NONE # Reverts the yellow colour back to the default one
All subtitles.entity.parrot.imitate: NoNe # Case really is not significant at all

# A more sensible set of strings to override colours for:
container.chest : DARK_AQUA
container.chestDouble : daRK aqUa # While the parser will accept this, the human sanity won't
container.crafting : §7 # If you like having to look into a table every time you read through
container.enderchest       :     DARK_PURPLE # Padding between the colon is at your discretion
container.inventory : GRAY // Double slash comments are also acceptable.

For more information about colour codes, read Formatting codes in the Minecraft wiki.

Note that if a player renames an object, such as a chest, that object's name will still use the default colour, as resource packs can only override the full string itself, which the player replaces in its entirety with a rename.