Namespaces

Namespaces are identifiers that mark content ownership. You can think of them as folders. Namespaces are helpful because they keep naming conflicts from happening.

Namespaces in add-on creation can essentially be thought of as "the part to the left of the colon". For example, minecraft is the namespace of minecraft:zombie. The general form is namespace:name.

As a concrete example of why namespaces are helpful, let's imagine you create a new Mob. You name it minecraft:shark, not aware that you should create your own namespace for custom content. Next year, Mojang decides to add sharks into the game! Now there is a naming conflict since there are two definitions of minecraft:shark. Your add-on will break.

If you had instead used your_namespace:shark, the naming conflict wouldn't have happened.

Picking a namespace ​

A suitable namespace is unique to you. Something like mob or cars or content or custom would be a bad namespace since another developer might come up with the same namespace as you.

A suitable namespace is short. You will be writing your namespace a LOT, so the shorter, the better. george_carlin_the_comedian would be a lousy namespace for this reason.

For personal projects, I recommend a convenient version of your player name, and for commercial projects, I recommend a suitable version of the company name.

Some good examples:

• gcarlin
• sirlich
• cubeworld
• bworks

DO NOT USE minecraft or minecon as a namespace unless editing a vanilla file. Not only is it a terrible idea, but Minecraft reserves these, and it won't even work.

Where to use namespaces? ​

In short, you should use namespaces as often as you can.

For starters, you should use a namespace when adding custom entities to the game.

sirlich:shark is much better than shark.

It would be best if you also used namespaces for components and events. Just like Mojang uses minecraft:pig_saddled you should use namespace:my_mob_event, and namespace:my_component_group.

It would be best if you also used namespaces in animation controllers, render controllers, and animations.

For example: controller.animation.namespace.entity_name.action is better than controller.animation.my_action.

Where NOT to use namespaces. ​

The actual file structure does not need namespaces.

animations/namespace/my_entity/animation is more confusing than animations/my_entity/animation.