Since creating a resource pack covers many aspects of the design and coding duties, we need several tools to help us with the process. The first thing we're going to do is get an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which will help us with the coding part. Some good options are:
Since we're going to edit the visuals of Minecraft, we also need an image editing program, here's another list of interesting options:
This is optional but, if we want to edit 3D models for our pack, we're going to need the following software:
And last but not least we need (of course) Minecraft itself.
Minecraft follows a folder hierarchy that we must follow if we want everything to work properly, down below I made an interactive menu with tooltips to better explain each one, hover any folder or file with a to display more info. The following tree menu is relative to: C:\Users\❬your_user❭\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\
To get the assets folder, we need to navigate to C:\Users\erpab\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\versions\❬version❭
Here we'll find two files, a .json, and a .jar file. We now need to open the .jar file with a program like 7-Zip or WinRar to access its contents, the way to do this is by right-clicking the .jar file, and opening it with one of these programs.
A new window should open with a list of folders and files, although, we only need the 'assets' folder, simply drag it into your custom resource pack folder as shown in the hierarchy.
The 'pack.mcmeta' file lets Minecraft know several things about our resource pack. A basic example of this file is the following:
The placeholder 'description of your pack' allows you to set a description of what your pack is. This will be visible in the pack selection menu.
We can also set a thumbnail or icon for our pack, the way we do this is by adding an image named 'pack.png' to our directory. The specifications for this image are:
To speed up this whole process, I've created a free online preview tool to help with this task.