Clarity gives you minecraft in a clear, no-nonsense way. Very low noise, very high visibility.
Playing with Clarity is a much calmer experience than vanilla, or even many simplified packs. When there is
less noise, there are fewer things calling for your attention. When differences are clear, information you
need is easily in your grasp. The visual world demands less of you, and you play with less distraction and
more confidence.
The design guidelines are:
Cleanliness balanced with elegance.
Low noise.
Fidelity with vanilla: If you use blocks to create a certain feel in vanilla, the feel
should be similar in Clarity.
Recognizability: You should be able to naturally know what's what.
What is different looks different, what is related looks related.
The pack is quite complete, all blocks, mobs, items, GUI, paintings, effects... Almost all are 16x16, but a
few are larger where it reduced noise a lot (for example, curved rail). Some particles (such as lava sparks)
are left untouched on purpose.
There are several things which the default textures hide, and Clarity makes clear:
There are actually two stages of sapling, eight stages of carrots and potatoes, four stages of nether
wart, and five stages of growing chorus flower.
Similarly, some grow until they get too old. But is a plant too old? Clarity shows you.
How wet is the farmland? There are eight levels.
How much power the light and heavy pressure plates are generating is shown.
Similarly, how much power the daylight detectors are generating is shown by lighting up cells.
The compass changes depending on where you are pointed. (It can be inaccurate, but at least Clarity
tries to show you.)
The Clarity Family
Clarity is actually a small family of packs:
Clarity has edges around most blocks to make it easy to count them, and see where blocks
begin and end.
Continuity has almost no edges, giving a continuous experience of the world.
Connectivity is a very complete connected texture pack, using
Optifine. It also uses the "random mobs" feature of
Optifine to provide over 100 different combinations of villagers in all skin tones in all
professions, all gender-neutral.
Contraption reduces the size of most blocks used in redstone contraptions so you
can see how they connect, and see the interior blocks of a contraption.
Current shows you the specific amount of redstone current in wires. This helps you build
redstone circuits by making the currents clear!
Beguile is just the UI elements, so you can have the clean UI with any pack you like!
If you want to know more about the Clarity pack family and its design, you have come to the right place. (I
don't know what's wrong with you, but this is the right place.)
Version numbering will be the same as the Minecraft version they are built for (for example, version
1.16.2 is made for Minecraft 1.16.2). Intermediate releases for the same Minecraft version will have
another subversion place added (1.16.2.1).
All mobs are modified, but for many of them, the primary goal is simply noise reduction. Chickens,
polar bears, endermen, etc., are often only changed to simpler swaths of color.
Fires are lowered in height, so they don't interfere with your vision, and are slowed down to be less
frantic, but are otherwise untouched. They are by nature rather noisy so it made sense to leave them as
such.
Rain and snow are vanilla textures with reduced numbers of drops/flakes. This makes them a lot less
annoying, but still visible.
Continuity and Connectivity don't make everything continuous/connected. Things that are
independent at the block level, such as furnaces and pistons, are still edged.
I may find a good hi-res font to integrate. For now, pick your favorite!
Some plants stop growing if their tops are too old (sugar cane, kelp, and cactus). Each has a lot of
intermediate ages (for kelp it's 25), but I texture only the oldest, so you can see that no more growth
is possible.
Currents only shows values for redstone wire. I'd like to include daylight detectors, targets,
and so on, but it is not possible to add transparent textures to most blocks, so there is no way to do
this in a visually tolerable way.
Paintings
The way to get art that isn't pixelated is to find original artwork that is entirely rectilinear. Luckily
there are abstract painters who worked in this style.
Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944, a Dutch painter who
was part of the De Stijl movement. He termed his rectilinear work neoplasticism. (These
are paintings or details from paintings.)
Carmen Herrera, 1915-2022, a
Cuban-American, recognized in her later years as art began to recognize its female greats. Most of her
work is linear, but not rectilinear, but these two were translatable.
Johannes Itten, 1888-1967, a Swiss expressionist,
Through his life he was often a teacher, including his own art school in Vienna and a stint at the Bauhaus
Sonia Delaunay, 1885-1979, a French artist,
she co-founded the Orphism art movement. She was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964.
Charmion Von Wiegand, 1896-1983, an American artist
who went from art criticism to artist, lived in the middle of the abstract art movement. She became president of the American Abstract Artists,
while constantly producing work.
Josef Albers, 1888-1976, a German-born American
designer and painter, some of whose rectilinear art also functions as color studies for designers.
Ilya Bolotowsky, 1907-1981, a Russian-born
American painter whose geometric abstraction includes much rectilinear work.
Tadeusz Kalinowski, 1909-1997, a Polish
artist, who was among those organized who first avant-garde artistic group in Poland after the war: 4F+R.
Of course, at 16x16 pixels (and multiples thereof), portraying these works requires approximations,
especially to avoid aliasing issues. You should see the originals or good photographs to get a better
experience.
Credits
Authors: BlueMeanial, with JUMBOshrimp277 aiding and abetting, doing many of the items, and advising on many
other points of design and deployment.
If you're trying to do a complete pack, my
Call Out pack can help you find things you've missed.
In doing this pack, I was originally inspired by the oCd pack by FVDisco. I liked it at
first, but eventually its rigid blockiness turned me off. I started by modifying how far down the side of
the block grass spilled, and eventually replaced everything. But I would not have started if oCd wasn't
almost but not quite the way I liked it, and my choices were influenced by it.
I also took some inspiration from the Paper
Cut Out resource pack by SuperAlgae. Which I really like.
The Vanilla Tweaks site has a lot of
interesting ideas, a few of which inspired work. And their downloading model is interesting.
Most of my testing has been done in RestWorld, a resourcepack testing
world I created that is compact and pretty complete. Check it out!
Clarity also textures my filter mod "philter", so maybe you want try that out.