Created due to a lack of the Tails mod for 1.16, Ears is a mod that adds ears, snouts, tails, horns, wings, and more to the player. Eventually, it also became a complete lightweight open source 1.9 skin backport for many old versions, which works even if you aren't using its special features.
Ears has a more vanilla-faithful appearance than Tails, with a lot of 2D regions but a few 3D ones too. There are a wide variety of possible configurations and it can all be customized.
Why use Ears instead of Tails? Because Ears is easy to port to other versions, based on a multi-version abstraction allowing the mod to even run in web browsers. The Tails mod has wonderful 3D models and animations, but it's a burden to update it to any version due to its large rendering system and all the data syncing code, causing it to be tightly coupled with the version of the game and mod loader it was designed for. Ears stores all data as pixels in the player's skin.
However, Ears requires you to draw your own additions, and does not come with easy recolorable prefabs like Tails. Additionally, unlike CPM or Figura, Ears has a limited number of customization options. (Note that if you have a simple idea, I may add it. Open an issue on GitHub or hop in Discord.) Ears offers a good middle-ground that will work in any version you wish to play, and will receive updates to snapshots for those of you who live on the edge. It also does not and never will use external servers, just Mojang's skin server, so there's no concerns about a third-party server going down (be it temporarily or for good).
Why use Ears instead of other skin fixes? Ears provides a lot of new features to customize your skin, and is a much more lightweight patch with no usage of third-party servers and is completely open source. Additionally, Ears backports translucent secondary layer support to 1.8 and 1.7.
Come discuss this mod and any of my others on Discord or Matrix, or send me an email.
A note on OptiFine
OptiFine is, in general, very hard to support due to its invasive changes to the rendering engine and its closed source nature. Additionally, in recent versions of Minecraft, OptiFine accomplishes very little in terms of optimization. However, in recognition of the fact OptiFine is a neccessary evil on many old versions, some versions of Ears have explicit compatibility with OptiFine. Here are the possible support levels:
- Supported: Known to be compatible, and bug reports with OptiFine present are accepted, and issues specific to OptiFine will be fixed.
- Unknown: Compatibility unknown, issues specific to OptiFine may be fixed.
- UNSUPPORTED: Compatibility unknown, bug reports with OptiFine present not accepted, issues specific to OptiFine will not be fixed.
- BROKEN: Known to be incompatible.
Here is the current status of OptiFine compatibility with Ears ports:
- Forge 1.2: Supported
- Forge 1.4: Unknown
- Forge 1.7: UNSUPPORTED
- Forge 1.8: Supported
- Fabric: UNSUPPORTED
- 1.15+: BROKEN - use Sodium/Iris instead
Downloads
Except where otherwise noted, these link to downloads here on Curse. Just here to make downloading easier, as Curse's UI for a mod available for as many versions as Ears is... lackluster.
Every port is actively maintained. None of these downloads are legacy, and they all receive updates at the same time.
Fabric (1.14 - 1.18)
Fabric API is not required to use Ears on any version.
New Forge (1.14 - 1.18)
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Requires MixinBootstrap |
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Requires MixinBootstrap |
Middle Forge (1.7 - 1.12)
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Also backports secondary layer translucency |
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Also backports 64x64 skins (Incompatible with SkinPort) |
Old Forge (1.2, 1.4 - 1.6)
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Must be put in coremods directory |
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Must be put in coremods directory |
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Requires special installation. |
Other — Rift 1.13.2, Legacy Fabric (b1.7.3, 1.8.9), New Frontier Craft, Not So Seecret Saturday, Better Than Adventure
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Having trouble running Rift in 2021? This may help. |
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Also backports secondary layer translucency |
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Also backports 64x64 skins and fixes skin download Works with either Cursed Legacy API or Station API. Does not require either. Download links to GitHub and is not checked by Curse. |
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Requires special installation. Download links to GitHub and is not checked by Curse. Don't know what New Frontier Craft is? Check it out! |
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Also backports 64x64 skins Requires special installation. Download links to GitHub and is not checked by Curse. Don't know what Not So Seecret Saturday is? Check it out! |
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Also backports 64x64 skins and removes reliance on Betacraft proxy Requires special installation. Download links to GitHub and is not checked by Curse. Don't know what Better Than Adventure is? Check it out! |
As Ears' primary purpose is allowing character customization across a wide range of versions, requests for porting to new versions or loaders are ENCOURAGED. Is there a version you still play nobody else seems to care about? Let me know in the issues.
awesome mod! and pretty easy to use too!
ones you understand really how the skin editor works it's really nice (you can use the single wing as a tail)
how do i use the fricking manipulator
how do i use this mod
Love this mod! Works great once I figured it out :P
I'm using the "Not So Secret Saturday" version, but even though the mod runs correctly, the game tries to load my skin from "http://www.minecraft.net/skin/Flexico64.png", which is not a valid URL.
Full log: https://pastebin.com/CETbNR00
In reply to Flexico:
All of the retrofork versions are broken right now due to changes in the mods. I haven't gotten around to updating them.
In reply to unascribed:
Oh ok! Thanks for the info~ ^w^
How do I add the wings? I've configured everything else just fin in The Manipulator, but the wings are still separate. Is there something special I need to do to get it to work?
In reply to RymondDragon123:
Wings are a separate 20x16 PNG file that the Manipulator encodes into your skin using a special encoding method I've nicknamed Alfalfa. "Uploading" the wing PNG to the Manipulator automatically encodes it into the skin; save it and upload it and it should show up in-game. You can see the encoding as "fuzz" on the head base layer.
It's done this way as there's not enough space in the skin for a "cleartext" version of the wing pixels.
you can do very cursed stuff with this
the 1.12.2 version of 1.4.5 keeps crashing my game, saying the following:
The game crashed whilst initializing game
Error: java.lang.Error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: net/minecraft/client/renderer/ImageBufferDownload
Exit Code: -1
In reply to LukeThe_idiot:
never mind it was optifine
Excuse me if I'm missing this somewhere, but is there a way to make part of the 20x16 wings texture transparent? I tried erasing the pixels and setting them to A = 0 in paint.net and it still shows up as white in game.
In reply to Vinyly:
Wings should work fine with transparency. I'll need more detail.
In reply to unascribed:
Yeah this one was all me. Turns out in Paint.NET I had my bit depth set to 24 bits, which apparently doesn't save transparency for .png. Setting it to 32 bit depth fixed it for me!
In reply to Vinyly:
If you're using paint, the problem isn't the mod, it's paint. Paint doesn't allow transparency. I'd recommend paint.net instead as it's basically an upgraded version of paint!
How do you draw the tail and ears after you have configured your skin?
In reply to garry_dude123:
Use the Manipulator to generate a sample skin. This will show you where the pixels need to go.
Hi! Your mod looks awesome as heck!
Question, have you considered putting up a tutorial on how this works? I have a hard time following written tutorials due to some disabilities but id really love to try it out
Also, maybe few images in the gallery to give people more of a look of the mod and what its like in game?
ofc you dont have to do either but thought it might help future people who are interested in the mod!
In reply to SilverTears13:
Ears is woefully underdocumented, disabilities or no. A rewrite of the Manipulator with a wizard-style flow has been on my todo list for a while — traditional documentation is not something I'm good at writing; I'm not a technical writer.
At some point I want to offer a Skindex-style site for sharing skins (optionally allowing others to download/use the skin) but I've been busy with other things.