Minecraft's menus are instant. Items teleport between slots, the hotbar selector snaps from one slot to the next, chat messages pop in, the creative inventory scrolls a whole page at a time, and screens blink open and shut. Animated GUI replaces all of that with smooth, framerate-independent motion — and lets you tune the style, speed and easing curve of every single one from a flat, Sodium-inspired settings screen.
Fabric · Minecraft 26.1.2 · client-side only · by dev-limucc
| Animation | What it does |
|---|---|
| Chat | New messages slide up from below and the older lines glide up with them, instead of hard-popping. |
| Item move | When a stack moves between slots (shift-click / quick-move, sorting, transfers), the icon glides from its old slot to the new one instead of teleporting. Stack-merges fly a ghost in and leave the existing stack put. |
| Creative scroll | The creative inventory's row-at-a-time "paging" is replaced with a true pixel-smooth slide — the slot grid and the items scroll together, by wheel or by dragging the scrollbar. |
| Hotbar | The selection box slides between hotbar slots instead of snapping (and snaps cleanly on the 8↔0 wrap). Optional motion-blur trail. |
| Menu open / close | Inventories, the pause menu and other screens scale or slide in when opened — and, thanks to a deferred close, animate out when closed too. The 3D inventory player model animates along with the panel. |
| Menu navigation | "Back"/"Done" between menus animates the old screen out before the new one animates in. |
| Recipe book | The recipe-book side panel slides in/out and the inventory glides aside to make room (instead of teleporting); paging recipes slides the grid. |
Every feature has its own enable toggle, duration (ms) and easing curve; screens additionally pick a movement style. There's a master switch to freeze everything back to vanilla in one click.
Linear · Smooth (sine) · Ease-out · Ease-in · Ease-in-out · Overshoot (back) · Elastic · Bounce
Pick Overshoot or Elastic on Menu open with the Scale style for a satisfying pop.
Scale · Slide up · Slide down · Slide left · Slide right
Open the ModMenu mod list → Animated GUI → cog. Everything is hit-tested and drawn by hand in the Limucc
flat UI style (dark translucent panel, accent-blue hover). Settings are saved to config/animatedgui.json.
Recipe-book panel / inventory-shift / page-turn animations follow the Menu open setting.
All motion is driven by wall-clock time (so it's smooth at any framerate) and routed through a single
retargetable Tween: when a target changes
mid-animation the curve re-anchors at the current value, so nothing ever jumps.
The animations hook MC 26.1.2's deferred GuiGraphicsExtractor / extractRenderState render pipeline via Mixin:
- Chat — translate the chat pose down by the just-added line(s) and ease back to 0.
- Hotbar — recover the per-slot base from the selection sprite's x and re-place it with an eased "animated slot".
- Creative — keep a display scroll value that eases toward
scrollOffsand re-issuescrollToeach frame. - Items — diff the container's slots each frame, pair an emptied "source" with a filled "destination" of the same item, and offset the destination icon back toward the source.
- Screens — start an open timer on
Screen.added(), wrap the content render with a scale/slide pose transform, and defersetScreen(null)so the outgoing screen survives long enough to animate out.
Note:Item move and Menu close are best-effort by nature (stacking/crafting read as moves, which looks natural; close is deferred by a few frames). All animations degrade gracefully to vanilla if disabled.
Requires JDK 25.
./gradlew build
# -> build/libs/animated-gui-1.0.0.jarDrop the jar (plus Fabric API and, for the settings screen,
ModMenu) into your mods/ folder.
The flat, animated look this mod uses is documented as a standalone, copy-paste-ready style library in
STYLE.md — palette, the Easing/Tween motion engine, the FlatButton / ToggleSwitch
widget kit, the screen skeleton, and the screen-transition system. Lift any of it into another Fabric mod; the
core pieces are self-contained. (AGENTS.md is the short entry pointer for AI coding assistants.)
MIT © dev-limucc — reuse freely.
{ "masterEnabled": true, "chat": { "enabled": true, "durationMs": 220, "easing": "EASE_OUT" }, "items": { "enabled": true, "durationMs": 200, "easing": "EASE_OUT" }, "creativeScroll":{ "enabled": true, "durationMs": 220, "easing": "EASE_OUT" }, "hotbar": { "enabled": true, "durationMs": 150, "easing": "EASE_OUT" }, "screenOpen": { "enabled": true, "durationMs": 220, "easing": "EASE_OUT", "style": "SCALE" }, "screenClose": { "enabled": true, "durationMs": 180, "easing": "EASE_IN", "style": "SCALE" }, "hotbarTrail": false }