Name: Paintable Signs
Author: Bullet

What it is

Minecraft signs can only hold text. Paintable Signs adds a Paintbrush: point it at any sign or painting and a small pixel-art editor opens, so you can draw a shop icon, an arrow, or a portrait of your dog. Save it, and the drawing is there in the world for everyone on the server. You can also craft blank canvases, hang them on a wall, paint them, name them, and hand the finished piece to a friend as an item.

You go to label a chest room and realise you don't have to write 'IRON' on a sign ever again. You can just draw an iron ingot. The editor is small and quiet: sixteen colours, a brush, a bucket, and undo that actually works. You zoom in with the wheel, fix one pixel, hit Save, and then you have to walk back outside to see it on the board, which is the good part. A few hours later your base has arrows, a shop front, a warning skull over the creeper hole, and one canvas somebody else painted and gave you.

👥 Playing with friends

Everyone sees the artwork; painting obeys spawn protection and adventure mode

⚠️ Before you install

Breaking an edited vanilla painting drops a plain Painting item and the artwork does not come with it. Save & Create Canvas first.
Fabric has no version handshake, so a 0.5 client on a 0.6 server will desync. Keep both ends on the same build.
Sign artwork is looked up by scanning the whole saved list once a second per player; a world with very many painted signs will feel that.
Version 0.6's permission checks and distance streaming are compile-verified only. They have not been through a real session yet.

Your first 5 minutes

New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.

Craft a Paintbrush: one stick and one piece of white wool.
Place a sign and write on it normally, and the text stays.
Right-click the sign with the Paintbrush to open the editor.
Draw with the mouse, wheel to zoom, Ctrl+Z to take a stroke back.
Press Save, then step back and look at the sign in the world.
Craft a Blank Canvas (wool with a stick on each of its four sides) and use it on a bare wall.

How it works

The brush and the editor

Using the Paintbrush on a sign, a painting, or a placed canvas opens a pixel editor. It has Brush, Eraser, Bucket (which only fills the connected transparent area you clicked), Pick (an eyedropper), Clear, and Undo/Redo sixty-four steps deep. The mouse wheel changes zoom in whole steps and right-drag pans the canvas; from 4x zoom up it draws a pixel grid. The palette is sixteen fixed colours.

Tip: Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y work as shortcuts, but they type normally while the name box is focused.

Signs

Standing signs, wall signs and both kinds of hanging sign are supported. Each face gets its own 32 x 16 layer, so front and back are separate drawings. The paint is a thin layer over the board and behind the letters, so vanilla sign text stays readable on top of your artwork. On hanging signs the pixels stay square and centred on the board.

Tip: Write the words on the sign first, then paint around them, and you get a label and a picture on one block.

Painting on vanilla paintings

The brush works on any placed vanilla painting. The canvas matches the artwork's real pixel size (sixteen pixels per block, up to 64 x 64) and the original painting is drawn behind your canvas while you work. Pixels you leave transparent show the real vanilla art underneath, so you can annotate a painting instead of covering it.

Tip: An edited vanilla painting still drops a plain Painting item when broken. Save & Create Canvas first to keep the art.

Blank Canvas finds its own size

A Blank Canvas has no fixed dimensions. Use it on a wall and the mod tries all sixteen shapes from 1x1 up to 4x4 blocks and places the largest one that fits the clear space. Breaking it before its first save gives back an unsized Blank Canvas; the first save names the artwork and locks that canvas's size.

Tip: Wall the space in first. The canvas takes the biggest shape it can, so a tight frame is how you get a small one.

Named artwork you can carry and trade

The editor has an Artwork name field and two save buttons. Save stores the drawing on that sign or entity. Save & Create Canvas also gives you a Painted Canvas item carrying the name, exact dimensions, pixels and backing variant, and the item is named after the artwork with a tooltip reading "Fits: 3 x 2 blocks". Making a copy consumes one Blank Canvas, free in Creative, and without one the save still succeeds with a message.

Tip: A Painted Canvas can be placed on a wall or applied onto an existing painting of exactly matching size.

The server decides

Every save is validated on the server: payload length, palette range, dimension, that the target is really a supported sign or a living painting entity, that you are within eight blocks, and that the face you clicked is legal. Build permission is checked at five separate points, including both save handlers, because an open editor can outlive the permission that opened it. A refusal puts "You can't paint here." on your action bar.

Tip: Spawn protection, adventure mode and the world border all block painting, so nobody can redecorate a protected spawn.

Artwork streams in by distance

Rather than sending every drawing in the dimension when you log in, the server keeps a per-player set of what you have and sends batches of sixty-four signs or eight painting artworks once a second. Things load at your view distance plus sixteen blocks and are dropped again at view distance plus forty-eight, and the gap between those two numbers stops it thrashing. Artwork near you appears within a second or two of joining.

Items & blocks

Paintbrush

Opens the pixel editor on whatever you use it on: a sign face, a vanilla painting, or a placed canvas.

Where: Craft one stick and one white wool in a crafting grid.

Blank Canvas

Place it on a wall and it becomes the largest blank painting the space allows, anywhere from 1x1 to 4x4 blocks. It is also the material cost of copying an artwork.

Where: Craft wool of any colour with a stick on each of its four sides, in a plus shape.

Painted Canvas

A finished artwork as an item. It carries the name, exact size, pixels and background, shows the artwork name as its item name, and tells you in the tooltip what size wall it needs.

Where: Press Save & Create Canvas in the editor while holding a Blank Canvas.

Paintable Painting

The blank painting entity a canvas becomes once it is on the wall. Sixteen shapes exist, one for every size from 1x1 to 4x4.

Where: Placed by using a Blank Canvas or a Painted Canvas on a wall. Breaking one returns the item, not a vanilla painting.

Texture gallery

Every texture this mod ships, at its real in-game size, scaled up so you can see each pixel. Most are 16×16, the same size as a vanilla dirt block.

Lore

Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.

The signwriter's trade

Every village has a signpost and every signpost says the same nothing. A board that reads STORAGE tells you a room exists; a board with a drawing of a pickaxe on it tells you what is in the room from thirty blocks away. This is the whole argument for the mod, and it is the argument shopkeepers have been making with painted boards for several hundred years.

Untitled

Any canvas you save without typing a name is called, in your inventory and forever, Untitled. It is not an error state. It is just what the mod calls art nobody bothered to name, which turns out to be most of it.

Jokes & trivia

Bits you might miss

Artwork you never named shows up in your inventory as "Untitled", with a straight face.
The editor's copy button carries the fine print "Costs 1 Blank Canvas (free in Creative)". Art has a material price, and it is one wool and four sticks.
Try to paint inside someone's spawn protection and the game just says "You can't paint here." and closes the door.
The palette is exactly the sixteen vanilla dye colours, so nothing you paint can be a colour Minecraft doesn't already own.
Sign text renders in front of your painting, which means you can paint straight over your own words and still read them.

From the workshop

The original Blank Canvas recipe was eight sticks around white wool, the exact shape of the vanilla painting recipe, which quietly shadowed it. It became a plus shape instead. Along the way it turned out the two Fabric builds had been using paper in the middle for months, so they never collided at all.
Breaking a saved canvas used to give back a blank one. Vanilla kills a hanging entity before it drops its item, and the removal event wiped the saved artwork first, so the drop code always found nothing.
Joining a world once sent every painting in the dimension at once, which on a well-decorated world could blow past Minecraft's packet size limit and kick you at login. Distance streaming exists because of that.
In 1.21.1 the editor's own drawing had to be moved into the background pass, because vanilla runs the blur-the-world effect there; anything drawn earlier came out blurry while the buttons stayed sharp.
Three of the six builds used to produce jars with identical file names, so downloading all six left you with three.

FAQ

Do my friends need to install it too?

Yes. It has to be on the server and on every client that wants to see or make artwork.

Can I import a picture from my computer?

No. You draw it by hand in the editor, with sixteen colours, like everyone else.

Does it change my vanilla signs?

No. The paint is a separate layer stored in the world's saved data and the sign block itself is untouched, text and all.

I painted a vanilla painting and broke it. Where did my art go?

An ordinary vanilla painting drops an ordinary Painting item, and the drawing does not ride along. Use Save & Create Canvas before you break anything you care about.

Which file do I download?

Jars are named by loader and Minecraft version: paintablesigns-fabric-0.6.0-mc1.20.1.jar and so on. Match both to your install.

Crafting recipes

Crafting recipe for Blank Canvas — Blank Canvas

Crafting recipe for Paintbrush — Paintbrush

Get it

Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.

Install NeoForge, Forge, Fabric for Minecraft 1.21.1, 1.20.1. The install guide walks through this assuming no prior knowledge.
Drop the mod's .jar file into your mods folder.
Everyone on the server needs it.
Launch the game with that loader's profile selected.

📦 Where is the file?

This wiki documents the mods; it does not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under mc-paintable-signs/build/libs/.

Mod by Bulletpies. MIT licensed.

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Paintable Signs

🎨 What it is