Nytheria Xaero Icon Fix

Better radar icons for Xaero's Minimap. A small client-only Fabric mod for Minecraft 1.21.1 that does three things:

• Players show up correctly. Other players appear as the plain vanilla head and hat with their own skin, fully inside the icon, even with custom player models (Entity Model Features, Fresh Moves), Entity Texture Features and 3D Skin Layers.
• Every mob of the Nytheria modpack has an icon. The mod contains a built-in icon pack with 611 mob types, including the bosses and modded mobs that Xaero shows as a plain dot. There is nothing extra to download or enable.
• Mobs Xaero cannot draw get an icon anyway. If Xaero fails to build an icon for a mob, for example for mods added to the pack later, the mod draws one from the mob's own model.

The same icons appear on Xaero's World Map, which draws the minimap's radar. Models in the world are not changed, only the radar icons.

Built-in icons for 611 mobs

The icons are small pixel-art sprites in the style of the Xaero icon packs, one texture pixel per sprite pixel, with Xaero drawing the black outline. They cover the mobs of the Nytheria modpack, including the bosses of The Twilight Forest, L_Ender's Cataclysm, Bosses of Mass Destruction, Aether, Eternal Starlight and Astral Dimension, all 102 Tide fish, and the vanilla and Vanilla Backport mobs. Mobs of NeoForge mods that the modpack loads through the Sporran mod (Cataclysm, Astral Dimension) are included.

And 23 more mods: Friends&Foes (11), Illager Invasion (11), Deeper and Darker (8), Eternal Nether (8), Better Nether Remastered (7), Galosphere (7), Better End Remastered (6), Bosses of Mass Destruction (Beta) (4), It Takes a Pillage Continuation (4), Variants&Ventures (4), Oh The Biomes We've Gone (3), Ecologics (3), Supplementaries (3), Goblin Traders (2), [Let's Do] Meadow (2), [Let's Do] Vinery (2), YUNG's Cave Biomes (2), Artifacts Remastered (1), [Let's Do] Beachparty (1), MmmMmmMmmMmm (target dummy) (1), Dusty Decorations (1), [Let's Do] Furniture (1), Winter Overhaul (1).

• The pack is built in and always enabled. In the resource pack screen it shows up as "Nytheria Xaero Icons (built-in)" and cannot be switched off. If it is missing from your selected packs, the game puts it at the top of the list, which is where it should be: Xaero takes an icon definition from the highest pack that has it. You can still drag another pack above it on purpose.
• It is only active when Xaero's Minimap is installed.
• The separate resource pack "Nytheria Xaero Icons" is discontinued because it is part of this mod now. If you still have its zip in your resourcepacks folder, remove it.

Icon Xaero's and Icon Fresh (optional, recommended)

For a part of the mobs (83 use Icon Xaero's, 53 use Icon Fresh) the built-in pack uses the hand-drawn sprites of Icon Xaero's 1.22 and Icon Fresh 1.3. Those packs are All-Rights-Reserved, so their sprites cannot be copied into this mod; the built-in pack only points at them. The mod works without them, but then those mobs get the generated fallback icon described below instead of the hand-drawn one. So keep them enabled if you already use them, below the built-in pack.

Fallback icons

Xaero builds an icon by tracing the mob's model. That fails for mods that render mobs differently (GeckoLib mobs), for some Fresh Animations models that draw nothing, and whenever a renderer throws. Icon packs can also point at a sprite that is not there, for example because the pack is switched off. In these cases the mod draws the mob with its own renderer in a neutral pose (no fire, no hurt tint, no name tag), reduces it to pixel art and shows the head from the front, or the whole mob if it has no head the mod can find. Xaero adds its usual outline and keeps the icon like any other.

• This also covers mobs of mods that are added to the pack later.
• If even that cannot draw anything (some particle-like entities), the mob stays a dot and the log says why once.
• To turn it off, start the game with the JVM argument -Dxaeroiconfix.fallback=false.

Icons that Xaero builds itself, icons from packs whose sprite loads, and item and dot icons are left alone.

Player heads: what was fixed

Xaero builds a radar icon by tracing the live renderer of the entity. For players that goes wrong with some mods:

• Entity Model Features with a player model pack (for example Fresh Moves) replace head and hat, so the hat could sit off the head, parts could be missing or the head was cut off.
• Entity Texture Features can hand Xaero the wrong player's skin, notably your own skin for everyone after F3+T, and Xaero then keeps that wrong icon.
• 3D Skin Layers swaps the hat for a voxel mesh when the player is close while the icon is made.

The mod draws the head (8x8x8, skin UV 0,0) and hat (the same cube inflated by 0.5, UV 32,0) itself, with the skin the game downloaded for exactly that player, through a separate buffer that these mods cannot hook into. The hat is left out if the player turned it off in Skin Customization. Icons are cached per skin and hat setting, so two players never share an icon, and an icon made before a skin finished downloading is replaced when the real skin arrives.

Xaero's flat skin faces for tracked (party) players outside the loaded radar range are not changed.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1 with Fabric Loader 0.19.1 or newer, and Java 21
• Fabric API
• Xaero's Minimap 26.5.0 for 1.21.1
• Xaero's World Map 1.46.0 is optional (tested with it)
• Icon Xaero's 1.22 and Icon Fresh 1.3 are optional but recommended, see above

Without Xaero's Minimap the mod does nothing: it applies no changes, registers no icon pack and writes one line to the log. The Fair-Play edition of Xaero's Minimap is detected the same way.

The mod is client-only. Put the jar in the mods folder of your client. Nothing is needed on a server, and no resource pack has to be installed.

For pack makers: icon audit

Client commands ask Xaero for the radar icon of every registered entity type, the way the radar does, and write <game dir>/xaeroiconfix/icon_audit.txt with one line per living entity type (OK, DOT, FAILED and a few more statuses, with the icon source, and fallback (xaeroiconfix) for icons made by the fallback). The built-in pack was made from such a report.

• /xaeroiconfix audit creates each entity type on the client without adding it to the world and asks for its icon.
• /xaeroiconfix audit live (singleplayer only, use a test world) also summons every living entity type in the integrated server, 8 at a time in front of you, with no AI, silent and invulnerable, and asks for the icon of the real entity. The camera turns towards each batch and bosses are summoned too, so do not run it in a world you care about.
• /xaeroiconfix audit live all does the same and exports pixel-exact portraits of every living entity (front, side and head) to <game dir>/xaeroiconfix/portraits/. By default the live audit exports portraits only for mobs whose icon failed or is a dot. They are rendered with the normal entity renderer, one texture pixel per image pixel, and are a good base for radar sprites.

An unattended audit that opens a test world, runs the live audit and quits is available with -Dxaeroiconfix.autoAudit=true (report ends with # RESULT: COMPLETE); it is off unless you set that argument. -Dxaeroiconfix.audit.portraits=all and -Dxaeroiconfix.autoAudit.timeoutMinutes=<n> (default 30) change its portraits and timeout.

Compatibility and limitations

• The mod uses a few small mixins into Xaero's Minimap and requires their targets. If an Xaero update renames them, the game stops at startup with a mixin error that names xaeroiconfix instead of silently drawing broken icons, and the mod needs an update. Made for Xaero's Minimap 26.5.0; other versions are untested.
• Other Xaero icon packs can stay enabled. The built-in pack wins for the mobs it defines as long as it is above them.
• The icon pack is made for the Nytheria modpack. In other modpacks, mobs it has no icon for keep Xaero's own icon, or get a fallback icon if Xaero cannot draw one.

License

MIT. Free to include in any modpack, no permission needed.