Using Player Animator as a Mod Developer's Starting Point

If you are building a mod and want custom player movement, this library is the layer you build on rather than something you configure.

Understand what it hands you

Player Animator exposes the player's animation state to your code so you can drive arm, body, and pose motion with keyframes instead of fighting vanilla's hardcoded swing. Keyframes let you define poses at specific points in time and let the library interpolate between them, which is what produces smooth motion rather than snapping. It also supports Bendy-Lib for more flexible, bendable rigs when simple keyframed poses are not enough.

Start from the provided resources

Do not begin by writing animation code blind. The mod ships documentation and example resources aimed at developers. Read those first — they establish the expected file layout and the calls you make to register and trigger an animation. Getting the registration step right is what makes the animation appear at all; the keyframe data only controls how it looks.

Keep your animations isolated

Because the library is built to reduce conflicts with other mods, follow that lead in your own code. Trigger your animations from your own events rather than globally replacing the player's animation state, so that a player running your mod alongside another animation mod does not get a fight between the two. Test with a second animation mod installed, not just on a clean instance — that is where conflicts surface.

Iterate in third person

Judge your work from third-person view. First person hides most of what you are building.