Rigs

What is a Rig?

A Rig is the group of entities your Blueprint creates in Minecraft. Every time you summon a Blueprint, you get a new rig instance. A world can hold any number of instances of the same Blueprint, and each one animates independently.

A rig is made of these entities:

The Root Entity

The root entity is the anchor of the rig: an item_display placed at the rig’s origin. Every other entity in the rig either rides it or is positioned relative to it.

Almost every rig function has to run as the root entity. You can select it with the <blueprint_id>.root tag:

execute as @e[tag=my_pack.my_rig.root] run function my_pack:my_rig/animations/idle/play

See Tags for every tag a rig uses.

Bone Entities

Groups that contain Cubes each become one display entity. Animated Java calls these bones. They’re animated by changing their transformation, and Minecraft smooths the motion between frames.

By default, bones ride the root entity as passengers, so the whole rig moves with it. With Use Entity Stacking turned off, bones are separate entities that are teleported into place instead.

Groups without Cubes don’t create an entity. See Groups.

Floating Entities

Locators (with Use Entity enabled), Cameras, and Interactions don’t ride the root entity. Animated Java teleports them to their position on the rig every tick, as long as Auto Update Rig Orientation is enabled, or when you call move.

Rig Identity

Each rig instance gets a unique number in the aj.id scoreboard objective. Animated Java uses it to find the rig’s entry in command storage, which holds the UUIDs of every entity in the rig. That’s how rig functions reach a specific bone without searching every entity in the world.

Rig Lifecycle

1. Summon: <blueprint_id>/summon creates the root entity and every node, then runs the On-Summon functions.
2. Tick: every tick, animated_java:global/on_tick (in the #minecraft:tick function tag) runs <blueprint_id>/root/on_tick as each rig’s root entity. This advances playing animations, moves floating entities, and runs the tick functions. You never need to call it yourself.
3. Remove: <blueprint_id>/remove/this runs the On-Remove functions, then removes every entity in the rig.

Related Reading

• Animations
• Variants
• Tags
• Function API: Summon