Minecraft Color Codes

What are Minecraft color codes?

Minecraft color codes are the two-character sequences — a section sign followed by a digit or letter, like §6 — that the game reads inside a string to change the color of the text that follows. They work in signs, written books, the message-of-the-day line of a server, JSON text components, and anywhere else Minecraft accepts formatted text. There are 16 of them, one for each color in the game’s fixed palette, running from §0 black through §f white, and each one also has a name — gold, aqua, dark_purple — that shows up in commands and config files.

Alongside the 16 colors sit six formatting codes that control style rather than hue: bold, italic, underlined, strikethrough, obfuscated, and reset. Typed by hand, both sets are easy to get wrong — the codes look alike, the order they’re written in matters, and there’s no way to preview the result without loading the game. This Minecraft color code generator lets you build the string visually, see it rendered the way Minecraft would draw it, and copy the finished output, so you can drop working formatting codes into a server.properties file, a plugin config, or a sign without guessing.

How to use the Minecraft color code generator

1. Type your text and pick a style. Enter your text in the field, click one of the 16 color swatches, and toggle any of the five formatting styles — bold, italic, underlined, strikethrough, or obfuscated. A prefix switch lets you choose between § and &, depending on where you plan to paste the result.
2. Check the live preview. The preview renders your text on a dark background the way Minecraft draws it in game, including the obfuscated style, which continuously scrambles the characters on screen just like it does in the actual game rather than sitting still.
3. Copy the finished code. The output field shows the complete string — for example §6§lWelcome — with a one-click copy button, ready to paste into a sign, a book, a config file, or wherever the code needs to go.

Where the codes work

Color codes turn up anywhere a server or the game itself accepts formatted strings. The message-of-the-day line in server.properties is a classic spot — that’s the description players see in the multiplayer server list before they connect. Server and plugin config files use them too: EssentialsX, LuckPerms, and most permission or economy plugins let you color rank prefixes, join messages, and broadcasts. In the world itself, they work directly on signs and written books, letting builders color a shop sign or a lore page with no plugin involved at all. Item names and team names, set through commands like /team modify, accept them as well, which is how servers end up with colored scoreboards and colored item names in chat.

Chat is the one place where the codes only work if something is translating them — vanilla Minecraft does not format player chat messages on its own, so a plugin like EssentialsX has to be installed and configured to read a player’s & codes and convert them to § before the message goes out. That’s also the practical rule for choosing a prefix: write § directly wherever vanilla Minecraft itself reads the string — server.properties, signs, books, JSON text components — and reach for & only in the specific plugin configs and chat setups that document support for it, since & means nothing to the base game by itself.

Honest limitations

The most common mistake is ordering the codes wrong. Applying a color code resets any formatting that came before it, so §6§lText renders bold gold, but §l§6Text loses the bold entirely, because the color code that follows wipes out the style that preceded it. The generator always writes the color code first and the style codes after, matching the order Minecraft actually respects — if you edit a code string by hand later, keep that order or the formatting will disappear silently.

The & prefix isn’t a vanilla Minecraft feature at all — it’s a convention that plugins like EssentialsX recognize in their own configs and translate to § internally, so it does nothing in places the game reads directly, like server.properties. The §x§F§F§0§0§A§A hex form the converter produces works the same way: it’s a Spigot and BungeeCord convention for writing any hex color as a chain of vanilla-looking codes, and it functions because those server platforms understand it, not because vanilla Minecraft does. Vanilla Minecraft 1.16 and later does support full hex colors, but only through JSON text components written as “color”: “#FF00AA” — a different syntax for a different context. Match the form to where you’re pasting the code rather than assuming one version is universal.

One difference between the preview here and the game: Minecraft draws a darker shadow behind every glyph, and this page’s preview does not. The shadow color for each of the 16 is listed in the table below if you need it.

Why is it free?

Everything above runs locally in your browser — typing, previewing, and copying the code never touch a server, so there’s nothing to sign up for and nothing gated behind a premium tier. No account, no watermark on the output, no cap on how many strings you generate. Free tools should just work, so this one does.