Thank you all for 2,000 downloads on Slime Variants. Last milestone, I created a special Cake Slime for the resource pack, but this time I wanted to try something a little different. I've never made a blog post before, but hopefully this works out. As a thank you, I wanted to show a little behind the scenes thing on how I make Slime Variants (and maybe show off some new stuff along the way!).

The Basics
Slime Variants uses Optifine in order to take advantage of many features that aren't available in a standard resource pack, but the most important one used is the Random Entity feature. This gives Slime Variants its defining feature - the ability to have variant textures of one mob. This is done by creating the textures you want to have in the pack and placing them alongside each other while naming them stuff like "slime2.png" and then adjusting the number as you add more and more textures. It can get a little crowded as you create more variants! This is what the Slime folder looks like as of the most recent update:


A little overwhelming at first, don't you think? I thought so too at first! Being this transparent might actually reveal some of the tricks that I use during creation... should I really be showing this!?

Boring .properties Files
While the textures are what make the pack look pretty, the ".properties" files are what do the heavy lifting. These determine how Optifine will spawn in certain variants. In these files, you can go as basic as possible and tell Optifine to just randomly pick between a certain range of textures, which is how the normal color variants are spawned in. Here's the code for that:


Simple, right? This is basically saying, "Take the files 'slime3.png' through 'slime18.png' as well as 'slime29.png' through 'slime 34.png' and randomly choose one as a Slime's texture when it spawns in". Slimes 3-18 are the original color variants from when the pack first released, but later on when I added Slimes 29-34 in the Colorful Update, I had to add those in this code block as well. When you just want to have textures randomly selected, all you need is this. But for some Slimes, the code is a little more complicated than that. For example, here's the code written for the Cloud Slime:


It's a little more complicated than the normal variants. This might seem a little confusing at first, but I'll try to explain the best that I can. Optifine has things based on priority in ".properties" files, which is why you see things labelled with numbers after them like "skins.56". The lower the number, the higher priority it has. This means that the more specific you get with a variant, the higher priority it has to be. This is why the Rainy Nighttime Cloud Slime is listed first while the Clear Daytime Cloud Slime is last in the list. There are also more requirements that have to be met by the other Cloud Slime forms, so they need to have a higher priority.

Slime Variants also has a feature where you can name a Slime to get a specific variant that you want at the cost of having a name floating above the Slime. This builds off of the priority thing that I mentioned above. In the ".properties" file, all code relating to this feature has the highest priority, meaning that regardless of if other conditions are met to spawn a specific variant, the name of the Slime will determine the variant.

You can also go into other specifics for how to spawn Slimes in, such as the biome that the Slime is in or the dimension, but this blog post is long enough already. Time for something I think everyone is interested in: never-before-seen stuff about Slime Variants.

Past Unused or Old Stuff
While I do try to use everything that I create for Slime Variants in some way, some things just never get used or they get updated sometime in the future. I try to save everything that fits into this category for personal reasons, and because of this I get to show you guys stuff that could have been in Slime Variants! To show these I'll be using Blockbench, a modeling software.

First up are some of the old textures for Slimes that are currently in the pack. These were all used at one point but have since been updated and they no longer have any use. Here they are:


The story behind the unused Cactus Slime texture is a little bit more complicated that it just being unused. Technically, it did get used, however it's more accurate to say that the texture that went on to be used was adapted from the unused one shown here. When I was creating the Cactus Slime, I originally planned to use Optifine's Custom Entity Model feature to make it have a unique model compared to all other Slimes. It was going to be taller than the normal Slime and it was going to have its spines actually stick out of the model. This was during the time when I was aiming to release updates weekly instead of when I felt they were ready, so I was running out of time. I couldn't get it working so, in order to rush and get the update out, I edited the texture seen here to fit a normal Slime. That resulted in the texture used for the Cactus Slime today. In the future, maybe I'll be able to finally do justice to the Cactus Slime, but for now this remains unused.

Slimes aren't the only mob that have old versions of their textures. Magma Cubes, while they don't have nearly as many scrapped things, also have some stuff that I want to share. Here are those things:


There are only early versions of the Blackstone Magma Cube that exist. The Test texture on the left was created to see how Magma Cube variants are handled by Optifine (as seen in the screenshot of the Slime Variants folder, they go in the same folder as Slimes do). It was a quick and easy edit just to figure out how everything worked. The texture on the right was the texture that was used in the early release for the Blackstone Magma Cube. It was used in the Spiny Update as a tease for the pack's Nether Update, and was you can see it was very early along. I added it in an effort to pad out the update; it would have been a very small update otherwise. Eventually, however, it got updated with a normal texture.

Now for the more interesting stuff. Here are some of the completely unused things that were created for Slime Variants:


The Tangerine Slime was originally meant to be added with the six other additional colors added in the Colorful Update, but I thought that it didn't really look that nice, so I scrapped it. Maybe I'll add it into the pack later after I make adjustments to it, but for now this is all that it's gonna get.

The two Phantom Slime textures are a bit interesting. The Phantom Slime was going to be a variant added alongside the Jack o'Slime in the Spooky Update. As you can probably figure out from the WIP texture, it was going to be based off of the Phantom that was already in the game. At the time of when the WIP texture was where it is in the above picture, I sent out preview versions of the new update to some of my friends so that they could bug test the Jack o'Slime as well as this Phantom Slime. I didn't have a completed texture for it though, so I quickly made up a placeholder texture for it which you can see on the right. Eventually though, due to a combination of it getting closer to Halloween, not coming up with a good way for it to spawn in, and not coming up with a good enough texture for it, I scrapped the Phantom Slime altogether and released the update with only the Jack o'Slime in it.

Fun fact: There are still remnants of the Phantom Slime in the Spooky Update's "slime.properties" file! I forgot to remove the code that would change a Slime into a Phantom Slime if you named it "phantom". Have a look for yourself:


I haven't pushed out an update since I released the Spooky Update, so if you're on the latest version of Slime Variants, you can open the "slime.properties" file and see it with your own eyes. Naming a Slime "phantom" won't work; you'll just get a normal Slime variant when you name a Slime since there isn't a 48th Slime texture in the files. I've already removed it from the development version of the pack so this will be gone when the next update comes out. Just an oversight that I thought was neat!

Finally, the end of the post!
Thank you all for downloading Slime Variants and getting it this far. I really enjoy making it and experimenting with Optifine's features and I'm glad to see that you enjoy using the pack. I hope you enjoyed this long-winded blog post about how I make the pack and I hope you're excited to see what I have in store for the next update to Slime Variants. Stay tuned!