HD Heads Extraction

Extracted copies of HD Heads, including their cropped versions and a script to extract and crop them yourself.

Contents

• /hd-heads/ contains the extracted textures of the HD Heads in The Shulker Archives. Some folders (Aheago I, Aheago II and all of Panthers HD Head Packs) contain a subfolder /cropped/, that contains copies of the textures that have been cropped for use as Emojis or PFPs.
• /scripts/ contains two scripts
  • PNG Apply is used to append .png to all the texture files extracted
  • HDH Crop is an interactive script used to crop the textures of a given folder to the size and area specified. Requires the Pillow library to run.
• Guide contains all the information needed to use the scripts.

What is this?

HD Heads were custom heads that, prior to Minecraft 1.17, were capable of displaying higher resolution textures than the typical 64x64px skins. This was accomplished by uploading high resolution textures to the Minecraft: Education Edition website, and then creating custom heads that used them in-game.

While many of the HD Heads created by the community have little or no value (simply being common images, memes and logos), there were several collections that were largely or even entirely made of custom artwork.

While Minecraft 1.17+ prevented the textures from being loaded, mods such as CustomSkinLoader, SoHead and hdheadfinal were used to bypass the restrictions and load them anyway. Somewhere around July 2024, Mojang deleted every single HD Head from the Minecraft: Education Edition website, rendering the entire collection useless. The copies here, alongside individual players caches are all that remain of them.

I took the collection of HD Heads I've amassed within The Shulker Archives, and carefully extracted all the textures I could. This was done by loading them in a clean Minecraft instance, one box at a time, and saving copies of the files that appeared in .minecraft/assets/skins/.

Once I had obtained all the raw files (and sorted them into folders relevant to their in-game boxes), I ran two scripts on them: PNG Apply, which appended .png to the end of each file, and then on specific folders I ran HDH Crop which created copies of the textures with the blank space/author credit cropped of, for use as emojis or profile pictures.

I've no idea if anyone will ever find this useful, but I've wanted to save copies of these heads since I first encountered them, so here they are.

Known Issues/Quirks

There are two major issues/quirks with the current set of images:

1. Some folders do not contain as many textures as there are heads in their in-game Shulker Box counterparts.
   1. This is because CSL (and/or Minecraft?) caches textures, so if I loaded HD Head 1 in Box A and saved the texture file, and then loaded it again in Box B, it won't create another copy of that heads texture file unless I restarted Minecraft between those boxes. Because of this I only managed to save the texture file in Box As folder.
   2. While this does (inadvertently) prevent duplicates, I do plan to re-extract them in the future with restarts between each box so that the folders are more accurate representations of each collection.
2. One of the boxes (Just Some Heads II) caused major issues when extracting, and as a result none of its heads textures have been saved.
   1. I am still unsure why it causes problems, especially as it's loaded fine prior to now, but I also know it doesn't contain much of anything important and thus isn't of particularly high priority in fixing.