MapPaint

Paint pictures right in the game: no resource pack, no other plugins.
A Paper 1.20 – 26.3 plugin, one jar for every version. 18 languages.

Place a canvas on a wall, take the brush and paint with your crosshair like with a mouse. A finished painting can be signed, copied, moved to another wall, or turned into a string and sent to anyone.

The idea comes from the MC Paint datapack, but here a canvas is made of regular maps in invisible item frames, so the client has nothing to download.

Features

• Paint with the crosshair. Hold RMB to draw, release to finish the stroke. Strokes show up instantly.
• Panel next to the canvas: point the brush at a canvas and buttons slide out — tools, brush sizes and shape on the left, a color wheel on the right, painting actions on top. Only the painter sees the panel. Windows can be dragged around.
• Seven tools: brush, eraser, fill, spray can, line, rectangle, ellipse. Shift keeps lines straight and turns a rectangle into a square and an ellipse into a circle. The brush is round or square.
• 244 colors — the whole map palette. Pick on the wheel, enter #RRGGBB, or take a color from a canvas or any block.
• Canvases from 1×1 to 5×5 blocks, any proportions (the limit can be raised to 16×16), on walls, floors and ceilings. 16, 32, 64 or 128 pixels per block, changeable on a finished drawing.
• Undo and redo — 30 steps per painting.
• Transparent color for stickers and paintings of any shape.
• Glowing paintings: use a glow ink sac on a painting.
• Signing and copies: a signed painting can't be changed but can be copied in a crafting table, like a book.
• Export and import as a string. A 96×64 drawing is about 460 characters.
• Images from the web by URL: crop or fit, zoom, offset, brightness, contrast, saturation, dithering.
• Placement preview: while you hold a canvas, the spot it will take glows on the wall.
• Painting together: the author can open a canvas for everyone.
• My paintings — everything you painted stays in storage even if the item is lost.
• 18 languages, switched with /paint language.

Install

Drop mappaint-1.0.0.jar into plugins and restart the server. PacketEvents is bundled inside, you don't need it as a separate plugin.

The language is English by default and is switched with /paint language <code>. A build also produces mappaint-1.0.0-ru.jar, the same plugin with Russian by default; it is attached to the GitHub releases.

Versions

One jar for Paper 1.20 – 26.3. Painting, the panel, menus, export, import and images work on every version. What depends on the version:

1.21.6 and newer	Older
Titles, color codes and painting codes go into a dialog	The same is typed in chat; a code is copied by clicking a chat message and goes in parts of 200 characters
Image settings	Image settings as a chest menu

1.21.9 and newer	Older
Icons are sprites inside text, always bright	Icons are item displays, darker on walls facing east and west

On 1.21.4 and older a block outline can show between canvas tiles under the crosshair.

Language

/paint language        current language and the list
/paint language ru     switch

Bundled: en, ru, uk, de, fr, es, pt, it, pl, tr, nl, cs, sv, zh, ja, ko, vi, id.

The choice is saved to config.yml (language: en). Translations live in plugins/mappaint/lang/ and can be edited; put your own xx.yml there and it becomes available as /paint language xx. Missing keys fall back to English. Items that were already given out keep the text they were created with.

Quick start

1. Craft a brush (stick + feather) and a canvas (paper + stick).

2. Need a bigger one? Hold a stack of 1×1 canvases and press Shift + RMB to pick a size: a 2×4 canvas takes eight. A crafting table works too: identical canvases laid out as a rectangle merge into one.

   

3. Place the canvas with RMB on a wall, floor or ceiling.

4. Take the brush and paint.

Brush controls

You can paint from up to 6 blocks away.

The panel

Every window has a + handle in the top right corner: hold RMB on it and drag, the window follows your crosshair and flows around the canvas and the other windows. With LMB it's two clicks: grab and drop. Shift + click puts a window back, /paint panel resets all three. The layout is remembered per player and used for every canvas.

What to do with a painting

Only the player who placed a painting can take it down. Only the author paints on it, unless "Anyone can paint" is on.

Screenshots

The Mona Lisa, The Starry Night and The Great Wave off Kanagawa (public domain) were loaded with /paint image.

Export and import

/paint export shows the painting code with a Copy button. The house drawing from the screenshot above, 96×64 pixels:

pc1:7ZVLjsMgDIbVqcbHYMGKU8yShY_DEXOyCcEQmhBiXlKr8ldVqjT9PmMefTx_fvXMO0W61P4ct9ziKwUYkmXXGhBzAikbBYg5gZSNAsSs4N35iKUC3ZffuH7u-ckYY0byjeEKaviGMohv9rSvzyw-JxBbyvnGcAQgRFpQiL8SwIWglH4WALjmrAY4CSrwRwHY5lg4eAPj_yWHPwhWrH270AC0Zm8qnkG4-t0wmumvghUoNr6dA3vtgI8EUXco25w04neBa46fXjeKe0EBP3Se-rO-dMf6hW97vIY0ZxKU-ktHqddzB3YD9Yo1xTz-vjZJYoUd-b7-ML12Irry4_0F3ftDx6ZrDh1xPev3AtoBtE6L-ItPkh9G4ItnHkBsfhgBOXRvvo74_PIL-PR4-v7kfwMfzlGKPixLfIm-ODyevn8Z5RPqD3c-gl-Y0XwYjJ-ZmZmZGZF_

/paint import opens a window to paste a code. The drawing goes:

• onto the canvas you are looking at, if it's yours (F undoes it);
• otherwise into a blank canvas in your hand;
• in creative mode a new painting is simply created.

A code isn't tied to a server, a world or a game version. If the canvas has another size, the drawing is stretched.

Importing costs paper: one sheet per block of the painting (configurable). Free in creative mode and for admins.

Imported paintings are marked: the item gets a yellow "Import" line, and menus show "import" next to the state. The mark goes away only when the import is undone or the canvas is cleared.

Very long codes are split into parts of about 12 thousand characters; the windows walk you through them.

Images from a URL

/paint image [url] or the panel button opens a window with settings:

The image goes to the same place a code would. Tuning is easiest on a canvas that already hangs: apply, look, open the window again — settings are kept, the previous result is replaced and paper isn't charged twice.

mappaint.image is op-only by default because the server itself downloads the URL. Localhost and LAN addresses are refused unless allowed in the config.

A painting as a block

Left: a block covered with three paintings of the bedrock texture. Right: real bedrock.

• import the 16×16 texture onto a 1×1 canvas;
• tick "Darken like a block face": the game shades block faces by direction and doesn't shade maps. The correction depends on where the canvas faces, so import onto a canvas that already hangs, each face separately;
• put a block of a similar color underneath: maps in frames are always drawn 1/128 of a block above the surface, so a thin seam shows the block below.

Admin menu

/paint admin gives plugin items (Shift + LMB for 64) and lists every painting on the server: LMB to take, RMB to export, Shift + RMB twice to delete forever.

Commands

/paint, also /mappaint. Painting commands apply to the painting you look at, then to the one in your hand.

Permissions

Config

plugins/mappaint/config.yml, applied with /paint reload.

Placing and breaking go through the regular HangingPlaceEvent and HangingBreakByEntityEvent, so protection plugins work.

Notes

• Colors are limited to what a map can show: 61 base colors with 4 shades each.
• Drawings are stored by the plugin in plugins/mappaint/paintings. Without the plugin the maps in frames are empty.
• A sketch taken from "My paintings" twice is the same painting: edits show up wherever it hangs.
• When the author deletes a painting it disappears from walls and its items turn into blank canvases.

Report a bug

Run /paint report while looking at the painting that misbehaves and repeat the problem during the next five seconds (/paint report 20 records for longer, up to 30). The plugin writes plugins/mappaint/reports/report-<time>.txt and shows the path. Attach that file to an issue.

The file holds the server and plugin versions, the plugin list, config.yml, the state of the painting, tick timings and recent plugin errors. It has no IP addresses, chat or tokens.

Metrics and updates

The plugin sends anonymous usage statistics to bStats; turn it off in plugins/bStats/config.yml. Once at startup it asks GitHub whether a newer release exists (update-check: false turns that off).

Build

JDK 21 or newer.

./gradlew build

Both jars end up in build/libs.

License

MIT. Use it however and wherever you like; the only ask is to keep a link to this repository and the author's nickname, BbIJABNPOBATEJb.