Chat

Minecraft supports two-way chat communication via the 0x03 chat message packet.

Character Set

Minecraft loads its internal 8-bit character set from fonts.txt in minecraft.jar. Ignoring the first line then stripping newlines, the file lists characters 32-255 in order. It follows ASCII for values under 0x80.

The character set is as follows:

" !\"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\\]^_'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~⌂ÇüéâäàåçêëèïîìÄÅÉæÆôöòûùÿÖÜø£Ø׃áíóúñѪº¿®¬½¼¡«»"

This list encapsulates all characters that are in the fonts file. Characters outside of this are acceptable, but are rendered differently.

Font

Minecraft loads its font from font/default.png in minecraft.jar. Glyphs 0-255 are given, each in an 8x8 area.

Minecraft also provides other font pages, as font/glyph_XX.png, where XX is the hex representation of the first byte of the UTF-16 character. The archive also provides font/glyph_sizes.bin. Glyphs are in-order, a byte a piece. The glyph's width can be ascertained from the expression (byte & 0x0F - byte >> 4). However, the sizes for the first 256 glyphs are *not* correct and the minecraft client generates them on startup.

Control Sequences

The client treats certain two-character sequences specially. The first character must be:

• § (U+00A7) for minecraft
• & for minecraft classic

The following character indicates a certain colour or formatting to apply to the proceeding text.

The Notchian client expects that an escape code in a chat message will be followed by at least one character, and will otherwise crash with a StringIndexOutOfBoundsException. The workaround for servers is to never end a message with a color control character.

Colors

These correspond very roughly to the colors available in ANSI terminals.

e.g.: This is white, but §4this is dark red

Hex digit to color mapping

Sample	Code	Common Name	Foreground Color			Background Color			Hexadecimal
			R	G	B	R	G	B
	0	Black	0	0	0	0	0	0	#000000
	1	Dark blue	0	0	170	0	0	42	#0000aa
	2	Dark green	0	170	0	0	42	0	#00aa00
	3	Dark cyan	0	170	170	0	42	42	#00aaaa
	4	Dark red	170	0	0	42	0	0	#aa0000
	5	Purple	170	0	170	42	0	42	#aa00aa
	6	Gold	255	170	0	42	42	0	#ffaa00
	7	Gray	170	170	170	42	42	42	#aaaaaa
	8	Dark gray	85	85	85	21	21	21	#555555
	9	Blue	85	85	255	21	21	63	#5555ff
	a	Bright green	85	255	85	21	63	21	#55ff55
	b	Cyan	85	255	255	21	63	63	#55ffff
	c	Red	255	85	85	63	21	21	#ff5555
	d	Pink	255	85	255	63	21	63	#ff55ff
	e	Yellow	255	255	85	63	63	21	#ffff55
	f	White	255	255	255	63	63	63	#ffffff

Styles

Like the color codes above, style escape codes are created by combining § (U+00A7) with one of the following characters. Style codes can be combined (except for "r") to enable multiple effects at once. Using any color codes will reset the current style back to plain (unknown if this is a bug or intended behavior). The "r" plain style code will also reset the current chat color back to white (may also be a bug). The "k" random style code is used for the "§kFUNKY LOL" message in /title/splashes.txt inside minecraft.jar.

Sample	Code	Style
	k	Random
	l	Bold
	m	Strikethrough
	n	Underlined
	o	Italic
	r	Plain White