If you want the most authentic, accurate recreation of the original, classic menu background panorama, this pack is for you!
This resource pack will replace your menu background with the original one from before 1.13, as a full 360° 4K panorama. This pack has 6 different variations, with 3 different textures: the old beta textures, the classic textures, and the new, current textures, and all 3 has a clear, and blurred variation as well. Go into the "Files" tab and select your preferred version.
Pack name abbreviations:
CMP - Classic Menu Panorama
B - Beta (referring to using old beta textures in the panorama)
C - Classic (referring to using the classic textures in the panorama)
J - Jappa (referring to using the new textures - made by Jasper Boerstra, otherwise known as JAPPA - in the panorama)
My intention with this pack was to recreate the old panorama textures as faithfully as possible. This largely meant getting the exact camera position right, as well as the cloud and sun locations right. Now, using the techniques I did to pull off these screenshots, meant that I had to sacrifice on some accuracy. These came from the subtle changes in the Minecraft versions over time, such as sky color, and tall grass positions.
For the curious, I've written below how I made these screenshots, as I think it's a story worth sharing:
I, of course first made the world in Minecraft beta 1.7.3, but in that version, you simply do not have the necessary tools to make these screenshots. I've had tons and tons of ideas on how to capture them, and pretty much all failed in one way or another, so I'll just write what worked.
What I ended up doing was downloading an old version of MCEdit that can open pre-anvil worlds, and I made a huge schematic of the terrain area. I then made a superflat world in 1.12.2 with the same seed, and pasted the .nbt schematic into the exact same coordinates. The reason being for this process, is that I found out that the Replay Mod can create 360° cubic projection images, which is not available for old beta versions. What makes this feature a necessity, is that the clouds are constantly moving, so I couldn't just use the /tp command to get the different angles. The screenshots had to be made at the exact same time. So this way, I can capture the entire view of the area all at once, without the clouds being all messed up and misaligned.
But I've run into some other issues as well.
One being that the east/west and north/south orientations strangely changed since beta 1.7.3, so I ended up having to rotate the terrain by 90° to get the correct sun position. Another issue were again with the the clouds. In beta 1.7.3 they appeared between layer 108 and 112, but in newer version they start at y=128. This meant the clouds couldn't be aligned properly. And since I could not for the life of me find a single mod that can actually lower the clouds, I just raised the terrain itself by 20 blocks.
So that was pretty much all I had to do to get exactly the same images. All the clouds are the same, the sun can be positioned with simple commands, render distance is the same, the only thing left was to get the exact same camera position, which really just meant a lot of trial and error until I got the exact same sight lines. It's pretty much pixel perfect to the original.
Then I recorded a bit with the replay mod, and in the playback I paused when the clouds are at the correct position, and took the screenshot. Then I used GIMP to slice up the cube projected image to 6 individual images.
And that's it! That's how I faithfully recreated these iconic images.
I hope you'll enjoy using them!