How to Add Ears, Snouts, and Other Features to Your Minecraft Skin

Ears stores all of your cosmetic data as pixels painted into your existing player skin, so you never need a separate config file or server-side account. The mod reads specific unused regions of the skin texture and interprets the colors there as ear shapes, tails, horns, wings, and more.

Painting the Feature Data

Open your skin in any image editor that preserves the exact pixel grid (a 64x64 or 128x128 PNG). The Ears regions live in the transparent or normally-unused areas of the skin layout, so you are not overwriting your face or clothing. Each feature has its own small patch of pixels, and the color you place there selects the type and shape. Because the data is just pixels, you can copy a friend's skin and inherit their ears exactly.

Enabling and Previewing

Once your edited skin is applied in-game, the mod reads the pixels automatically. If nothing appears, the most common cause is that your editor flattened transparency or resized the image. Re-export as a clean PNG at the original dimensions. Use the in-game skin customization screen to toggle features on and off and confirm each one is being detected before you finalize the look.

Tips

Keep a backup of your plain skin so you can revert. Test on a local world first, since other players only see your features if they also run the mod.