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.

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