The HUD

Minecraft 1.21.1Fabric + NeoForgeTenet 0.2.0

Tenet draws three things outside its own screens: the quest book's button over your containers, the quests you have pinned, and the notices that tell you something just happened. All three are yours to place — switch them off, move them, or put them back where they shipped — in the HUD editor, which opens on H or from the book's Settings card.

The HUD is drawn over the world and over nothing else. It is a thing to read while you play, and the book — one key away — is where you act. The one exception is the pins: with chat open the cursor is already free, and a press on a box opens the book on that quest, with the canvas brought to it. The box under the pointer wears an outline, so a press lands where the ring says it will. Chat keeps every press that lands nowhere near a pin; a press on one closes chat, so anything typed but unsent goes with it.

Pinning a quest#

Three ways in, and they all do the same thing:

• Right-click a quest on the canvas. Pin to HUD adds it; a pinned quest offers Unpin from HUD instead. This works whether or not you can edit the pack — pinning writes your own file, so there is no permission to ask for. With several quests selected in edit mode, the rows act on all of them at once.
• Open a quest and press the star in its header, next to the back arrow. A filled star is pinned, a hollow one is not.

At most six quests are pinned at once. A seventh is refused with a message rather than quietly pushing one of yours off the list, and pinned.json is a text file you can edit.

A quest you have finished and collected leaves the stack on its own: a watched quest with nothing left to watch is a box nobody asked for. The pin stays — hiding is not unpinning, so it is still in the list and comes back if anything about the quest changes — and Hide claimed quests in the HUD editor switches the hiding off. A finished quest with rewards still out stays until you collect them.

Pins are yours, not the world's. They live in this client's own config, they survive leaving a server, and a pin naming a quest no loaded tree holds is skipped in the draw. It does not wait forever: the next time the tree moves on, dead ids are pruned — except while no tree has arrived yet, when there is nothing to judge them against.

The pinned boxes#

Every pinned quest gets its own box, stacked down the left edge in the order you pinned them — most recent first. Each box shows its quest's name and chapter, then its tasks with their counts (3 / 8) and a tick on each one that is done. A task that is underway grows a 2-pixel bar under its sentence, filling as it goes and gliding to the new width when progress lands rather than jumping; the unfilled remainder is a grey track rather than empty world, so a half-done task reads as a bar. A task with nothing done yet shows none. A finished quest says Complete in its own box — or Claimable, when its rewards are still out: done is not the news, collectable is.

The book's header has a Pinned button, beside Settings, that lists every pin: each row wears its quest's icon, a press opens its card with the canvas brought to it, and the star on its end lets it go. Finished and collected quests read dimmed there, which is what tells them from the ones still being watched. Whether they leave the stack on their own is the Hide claimed quests switch in the HUD editor, on unless you say otherwise.

The boxes are transparent: no fill, just a thin edge, over a dim wash whose strength is yours. The slider on each drawn element's row in the HUD editor runs 0 to full — 0 is edge-only, full is the theme's own wash — and the pins ship at half while the notices ship full, which is the look each of them already had. Text is drawn with its shadow, which is what keeps it readable with no panel behind it.

The stack sits middle-left and grows from the middle: pin another quest or finish a task and the boxes above and below move equally, so the thing you are reading does not slide away. Drag it anywhere in the HUD editor and it stays where you put it; Reset puts it back middle-left.

The notices#

Three things are announced, and each is said once:

A quest completing also swallows the tasks that finished with it — the last task is what completes a quest, and one sentence followed by the whole task list is a parade rather than news. A quest whose rewards are set to be granted silently (no_toast) says nothing at all, tasks included; that is the author's answer to "do not announce this one", and it is the switch to reach for rather than the volume of your own HUD.

Where a notice appears depends on where you are looking:

• The book is open — it goes to the book's own stack, over the book, because chat cannot be read behind a screen.
• The book is shut, and the Notifications element is on — it draws as a row at that element's place, in the panel colours, and fades after a few seconds.
• The book is shut, and that element is off — it is a toast in the corner, the way it has always been.

The Notifications element ships on, so a fresh install reads its notices on the HUD. If you preferred the toasts, switch it off in the HUD editor and they come back; there is never both at once, so one completion is never said twice.

The editor#

H opens it over the live world, which is the point: every element is drawn where it really is, at the size it really is, so what you drag is what you see in game.

Drag an element to move it. Every position is a pair of pixels in your window, so it means the same thing in the editor and in the game at any window size; nothing travels with anything else, and a position that would land off the window is pulled back onto it as you drop it.

The inventory button's row carries two extra controls: an anchor switch reading Window or Inventory, and an Under button. Window is where it ships -- a window pixel from the window's corner. Inventory measures the button from the inventory panel's own corner instead, so a button put under the inventory stays under it when the GUI scale, the window size, or the recipe book moves the panel; switching between the two keeps the button visibly where it is and only rewrites the numbers. Under anchors to the inventory and centres the button under the panel in one press. While the button is inventory-anchored the editor draws the closed-book panel as an outline to place against; with the recipe book open the live panel sits left of that outline and the button follows it there.

The elements are:

The two files#

Both live in config/tenet/ and both are safe to hand-edit; the game reads them at startup.

hud.json holds only what you changed, as a diff from the shipped layout, so a file you have never touched does not exist and one you have put back is empty:

{
  "elements": {
    "pinned_quests": { "x": 210, "y": 8 },
    "notifications": { "on": false },
    "inventory_button": { "x": 80, "y": 170, "anchor": "inventory" }
  }
}

An anchor of "inventory" measures the button from the inventory panel's corner; left out, the button is a window pixel as it has always been.

pinned.json holds your pins, in the order they are drawn — most recent first:

{ "pins": ["chapter_one/gather_wood", "chapter_one/craft_a_table"] }

hideClaimed travels with them, written only when you switch it off — it is on unless the file says false:

{ "pins": ["chapter_one/gather_wood"], "hideClaimed": false }

A pin whose quest is not in the pack you are playing is skipped in the draw. When the pack moves, so does the list: ids the tree no longer holds are dropped, and the ones you pinned stay in your order.

The files beside them#

hud.json and pinned.json are two of six client files under config/tenet/, all read at startup and all safe to hand-edit. The same tolerance everywhere: a file you have never touched does not exist, an unreadable one is reported and the defaults stand in, and unknown fields are ignored.