PoliceHat

About

PoliceHat adds a wearable police cap with a glowing beacon that never stops spinning — and a soundtrack that follows you while you wear it.

The hat works as a lightweight helmet, can be placed on players and humanoid mobs, and plays its music only for the person currently wearing it. Take it off, drop it, die, switch worlds, or disconnect, and the music stops immediately.

Install on both the client and the server. On Fabric, Fabric API is also required.

Free to use in any modpack — public or private, no permission needed.

What it does

• Wear the police hat — equip policehat:police_hat in the helmet slot.
• Spinning beacon — the light on top rotates continuously and glows in the dark.
• Built-in music — a soundtrack loops while the hat is on your head and stops as soon as it is removed.
• Local playback only — you hear your own hat, not every other player wearing one.
• Works on humanoid mobs — right-click a compatible mob while holding the hat to place it on its head.
• Supports armour stands — use the hat as part of displays, builds, scenes, or decorations.
• Light protection — the hat provides 1 armour point, the same as a leather helmet.
• Unbreakable — it never loses durability and stacks to one.
• Ten languages included — English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Simplified Chinese.

The hat is intended primarily as a cosmetic item rather than a serious piece of armour.

Crafting

Place a redstone torch above three blocks of black wool:

 T
WWW

• T = Redstone Torch
• W = Black Wool

For modpack makers

PoliceHat can be customised without modifying or repackaging the mod. Its music settings live in:

config/policehat-client.properties

The file is generated automatically on first launch.

The configuration is client-side. It controls what an individual player hears, so it should be included in the client side of a modpack rather than only on the server.

Volume is applied on top of the player's own Minecraft sound settings.

The sound category can use values such as:

records
music
master
ambient
players
blocks
hostile
neutral
weather
voice

The ui category is also available on supported newer Minecraft versions.

Minecraft-style singular names such as record, player, and block are accepted as well.

Using another sound

The hat can play any registered sound event available in the current installation.

For example, to use a vanilla music disc:

music.sound=minecraft:music_disc.pigstep

A missing namespace defaults to minecraft.

You can also add your own sound through a resource pack:

assets/mypack/sounds.json
assets/mypack/sounds/siren.ogg

Example sounds.json:

{
  "siren": {
    "sounds": [
      {
        "name": "mypack:siren",
        "stream": true
      }
    ]
  }
}

Then point the config to it:

music.sound=mypack:siren

Minecraft does not support MP3 files. Custom tracks must use the Ogg Vorbis format.

You can also replace the default track directly through a resource pack by overriding:

assets/policehat/sounds/police_hat_music.ogg

To keep the spinning hat but disable the music completely:

music.enabled=false

Safe configuration

Invalid settings cannot crash the mod.

Unknown values, malformed sound ids, unsupported sound categories, and invalid numbers fall back to safe defaults. Out-of-range numeric values are clamped to their supported ranges.

If the configuration file cannot be read at all, PoliceHat keeps the settings that were already active rather than unexpectedly resetting them.

The file also accepts decimal commas, so both of these work:

music.volume=0.5
music.volume=0,5

Blank values simply use their defaults.

Reloading the config

Use the following command after editing the file:

/policehat reload

The command reloads the client configuration without restarting Minecraft and reports any invalid settings in chat.

It is a client-side command, requires no operator permissions, and works in both singleplayer and multiplayer.

When music settings change while the hat is already being worn, the track restarts with the new settings.

Resource packs and data packs

A resource pack can replace the hat's textures, inventory icon, item model, translations, and music.

Common resource locations include:

assets/policehat/textures/entity/police_hat.png
assets/policehat/textures/item/police_hat.png
assets/policehat/models/item/police_hat.json
assets/policehat/lang/en_us.json

The hat's 3D shape is defined in code, so resource packs can change its texture but not its geometry.

The crafting recipe is a normal data-pack recipe and can be replaced or removed using a data pack, KubeJS, CraftTweaker, or standard loader recipe events.

The stable ids are:

Mod:   policehat
Item:  policehat:police_hat
Sound: policehat:police_hat_music

Feedback

Please report any bugs, errors, or feature suggestions on Discord: https://discord.gg/HTkn94BXmA