Mineclone2 Skins (rpi minetest-server part 4)

posted on 30 May 2020 | Software

Continuing on our marathon process of setting up the perfect Mineclone2 server, this is going to be a brief side-guide - how set up skins in mineclone 2. I tried several approaches to this problem - the popular skin mods in minetest are meant to manage a connection to an online database of skins, and I just wanted to pre-load enough skins so the kids would have a library to choose from.

I couldn't get any of the existing skins mods to work fully, so we're going to just set the files up manually.

The MineClone2 Skins Mod

MineClone2 has a built-in skins mod (remember that minetest games are collections of mods), but it only includes two skins by default. The skins are located in the mineclone2 game folder under mods/PLAYER/mcl_skins, so on our Raspbian server it will be located at

/var/games/minetest-server/.minetest/games/mineclone2/mods/PLAYER/mcl_skins

This is the root folder for the minetest skins mod. Each skin requires 2 files and 1 optional file. Each skin requires

textures/mcl_skins_character_N.png -- the actual skin file
textures/mcl_skins_player_N.png -- the preview of the skin file that you'll see in the picker
meta/mcl_skins_character_N.txt -- the text description of the skin (optional)

where N is the skin's number. The skins are sequentially numbered with no gaps - so I had skins 1 through 94. If you have a gap in the number mcl_skins will stop searching.

example files

The meta txt file

One of the three files is the meta text description of the skin. It seems to only ever contain 2 lines:

name = "Example_skin",
author = "exampleauthor",

I'm a stickler for credit so I always included the author name, but the MineClone2 skin picker didn't seem to show it anywhere.

The source

Mineclone2 skins are downloaded from the skins db. Pick the skins you like, download the skin file and then rclick-save to download the thumbnail.

The process

So basically, our way to manually set up the skins is

1) On the skins website, download the skin and thumbnail of the skin you like.

2) Rename the thumbnail and skin to match the mineclone2 skin-mod standard, being sure to copy out the part of the name that includes the author and skin-name.

3) Create a meta txt file with the name and author as described above.

4) Upload the files to your server and put them into the correct folder.

You shouldn't need to chmod/chown anything because the minetest server users only need to read the files.

Next time

Readdyyyy toooooo Mummmbbblle!