Welcome Board

Drop a JSON file in your pack's config folder and every player sees a welcome screen the first time they join. No FancyMenu, no Better Compatibility Checker, no other mod required.

This is for modpack authors, not players. It reads config/welcome_board/welcome.json and shows a title, body text, an optional image, and a row of link buttons in a screen that appears once per player, then never again — unless you bump a revision number, in which case it shows once more.

Client-side only. There is no server component — put it in the pack's client mods and you are done.

Content file

{
  "revision": 1,
  "title": "Welcome to Example Pack",
  "body": [
    "Thanks for downloading. A few things before you start:",
    "Crafting recipes are unchanged except where noted on the wiki.",
    "Join our Discord if you run into problems."
  ],
  "image": {
    "id": "welcome_board:textures/gui/logo.png",
    "anchor": "top",
    "width": 128,
    "height": 64
  },
  "buttons": [
    { "text": "Wiki", "url": "https://example.com/wiki", "anchor": "bottom_left" },
    { "text": "Discord", "url": "https://discord.gg/example", "anchor": "bottom_right" }
  ],
  "close_text": "Got it"
}

• anchor accepts top, top_left, top_right, center, left, right, bottom, bottom_left, bottom_right. Unrecognized or missing values fall back to center.
• For buttons, only the horizontal component of the anchor matters — top_left/left/bottom_left all mean "left-aligned", top_right/right/bottom_right all mean "right-aligned", and the rest center. Buttons always sit in their own row at the bottom of the panel; the vertical part of their anchor is ignored.
• Every field is optional and independently defaulted. A file missing title still shows a screen titled "Welcome"; a malformed buttons entry is dropped and the rest still renders. Nothing you get wrong here makes the screen fail to appear — the pack author's chat (via /welcomeboard preview, see below) or the log tells you what was skipped and why.
• Buttons are capped at 8, body text at 32 lines, and the file itself at 64 KB; anything beyond that is dropped with a logged warning instead of breaking the screen. In practice about four buttons fit across the row at a typical panel width — extra ones are dropped from the end, so put the important links first.

Multiple pages

Any file in config/welcome_board/ other than seen.json is loaded as its own piece of content, keyed by filename. welcome.json and patch_notes.json can coexist and are tracked separately — each has its own read state and its own revision.

Commands

/welcomeboard preview opens your own screen on demand, using whatever is currently in welcome.json, without touching read state — use it to check a file while you're editing it. Any warnings the parser produced (bad JSON, a dropped button, a missing field) are printed to your chat at the same time, so a typo shows up immediately instead of silently doing nothing.

The command is NeoForge-only in this version. On Fabric the screen itself works the same; only the preview command is missing.

Behavior notes

• Waits about a second after world join, then checks whether another mod's own first-join screen (Origins and similar) is already open. If one is, it waits up to 3 more seconds for it to close before giving up for that session and logging why — it never fights another mod for the screen.
• Read state is tracked per server/world, not per game instance: the same pack on two different servers shows the welcome screen once on each.
• Config has one setting: enabled.

Not in this version

• No server-authoritative content push (the file lives on each client)
• No multi-page navigation inside a single screen
• No commands run from a button — buttons only open a URL
• One image per content file

Install on the client. No dependencies, and nothing to install server-side.

All Rights Reserved. Free to include in modpacks on CurseForge and Modrinth (monetised ones too) — no permission needed, no credit required. Source is published so you can read exactly what it does.

Source and issues: https://github.com/KURONAMI333/welcome-board