Extracting Assets from Minecraft Java

Oftentimes, you'll want assets from Minecraft, for things from a texture pack to a custom voxel editor for Minecraft. This tutorial teaches you how to extract files for things like vanilla texture packs, models, particles, shaders, advancements, font, block states, text for the different languages, and much much more directly from your Minecraft install's .jar file

Navigate to the .jar

First, you'll want to go to the Minecraft directory for your OS (You'll want an install of Minecraft for this):

OS	Location
Windows	%APPDATA%.minecraft
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/minecraft
Linux	~/.minecraft

Then, you'll want to go to the versions directory and then into the directory with the name of the version of Minecraft that you want to extract the files from (you should see the .jar file)
If you can't see the version, go to Minecraft and launch the version that you want to extract assets from

Linux, MacOS, & WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

Copy extract-unobfuscated-data.sh into the directory before making it executable:

chmod +x extract-unobfuscated-data.sh

running it (it'll by default export to extracted-data, but you can specify another directory in the arguments):

./extract-unobfuscated-data.sh

This will create an output directory that contains all of the Minecraft assets (the data that's removed are just obfuscated .class files that we don't need)

Windows

Since windows doesn't support execution of .sh and isn't unix based files you'll want to install WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)
You can run this in powershell in order to install it:

wsl --install

You can learn more about WSL here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

Then, since you'll have WSL installed, you can follow the steps for Linux, MacOS, & WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) with WSL by navigating to the directory and then opening it with WSL

How does extract-unobfuscated-data.sh work
and
How can I do this without it? (manually)

What extract-unobfuscated-data.sh does is unzip the .jar file and remove all of the unnecessary directories that just contain obfuscated .class files.

.jar's are technically just .zip files, but with a different extension that signifies that it can be executed with the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) which means that you should be able to unzip it.

If you can't unzip it as is, create a copy (so that you can still play that Minecraft version), but with an extension of .zip
Then, delete all of the .class files as well as the com & net directories from the unzipped result, which will leave you with just the extracted data left

I recommend taking this route if you can't run extract-unobfuscated-data.sh since this is just what it's doing