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Introduction

TextEffect is a shader-based animated text plugin for modern Minecraft servers.

It gives server owners and developers a clean way to use animated text across supported display targets without manually building resource packs, shader files, version profiles or item component commands.

What TextEffect does​

TextEffect lets you use tags such as:

<rainbow>Event Started!</rainbow>
<g>Winner!</g>
<neb>Premium Server</neb>
<luv>Thank you!</luv>

The plugin turns those tags into shader-powered text that animates client-side through the generated TextEffect resource pack.

Key features​

  • 50 built-in animated text effects
  • Spigot, Paper and Purpur support from Minecraft 1.21 to 1.21.11
  • Automatic version profile detection for generated resource packs
  • Animated item names and lore
  • Animated signs, books and anvil-created item names
  • Animated bossbars, titles, actionbars, sidebars, tab text, entities and holograms
  • LuckPerms prefix/suffix support
  • DecentHolograms helper commands
  • Public Maven Central API for developers

How it works​

TextEffect generates a resource pack with custom fonts and shaders.

When text is rendered with a TextEffect tag, the plugin applies a hidden trigger colour and custom font slot. The client-side shader detects that trigger and applies the matching animation.

The server does not need to constantly animate text every tick. Most of the visual work happens client-side.

Basic setup flow​

  1. Install TextEffect.jar on your server.
  2. Start the server once to generate plugins/TextEffect/settings.yml.
  3. Run /texteffect zip.
  4. Upload plugins/TextEffect/generated/TextEffect-Pack.zip to direct resource-pack hosting or manually install into the Minecraft resource packs folder.
  5. Put the hosted direct download URL in settings.yml.
  6. Enable resource-pack.send-on-join if you want the plugin to send the pack automatically.

Previewing effects​

Use the browser preview page to search every effect, test custom text and copy tags:

/effects

The browser previews are close recreations. The final in-game look can differ slightly because Minecraft uses its own font, shader and resource-pack rendering pipeline. Appearance can also vary between display targets, for example chat renders as flat 2D text while entity names and holograms may appear with more depth in-game.