How to Edit Paintings in Minecraft

By Naomi Bolton

Updated September 22, 2017

Paintings are not imperative to your survival in the Indie hit "Minecraft," but it does help make your dwellings a bit more aesthetically pleasing. While you need to craft the paintings from sticks and wool, the game randomly selects the pictures on them from the ones contained in the art file for the game. It is not possible to edit these paintings from within the game, but once you locate the art file, you can open it with any image editing program and edit it to your heart’s content.

Exit the game if you are playing it and then click on the Windows "Start" button. Click in the search box and type ""%appdata%" (without the quotation marks) before pressing "Enter." This will take you to the folder where the "Minecraft" data is stored.

Double-click the ".Minecraft" folder and then do the same with the "Bin" folder. Right-click on the file called "Minecraft.jar" and select "Open With WinRAR" from the context menu. If you do not have "Winrar" installed on your computer it is available for free from the official website (see Resources).

Double-click the "Art" folder once you have opened the file with Winrar. Right-click the "KZ.PNG" file and select "Extract to specified folder" from the menu. Select your Windows desktop as the location and then click "OK."

Minimize WinRAR and open your image editing software. You can use a commercial product such as "Photoshop," freeware such as "Gimp" (see Resources) or even "Paint" that is included with Windows.

Click "File" and “Open" before selecting the art file that you extracted to your desktop. You'll see the pictures of the painting on a purple grid background.

Change the painting you want to edit using tools such as the paintbrush and eraser. Take care to stay within the grid that displays the painting. You can also copy and paste another image onto the image and resize it to fit over one of the existing paintings. Once you are pleased with the results, click "File" and "Save" to overwrite the original file.

Maximize WinRAR and click "Add" at the top of the screen. Select the "PNG" file on your desktop when asked to specify which files to add and click "OK." The original artwork will change to your edited versions.

Start the game and craft your paintings as normal. You will notice that instead of the original paintings, the ones that you edited will now display.

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