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Creating and Adding Custom Sounds to Minecraft

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Image of player standing with two jukeboxes.

Sounds are a great way to add a sense of immersion to your content. Whether it's blocks, animals, or the ever-important music disc, the sounds you hear while playing Minecraft pull you into the experience. In this tutorial, we will be adding a custom sound that will play when we open a chest, increasing the immersion and personalization of your world.

Prerequisites

We recommend completing the following before beginning this tutorial:

You will also need the following:

Create a Resource Pack

The first step in our journey is to create a resource pack to hold your custom sounds. If you completed the prerequisites as suggested (hint, hint), you're already familiar with this process.

For a quick refresher, see Introduction to Resource Packs.

For detailed information on resource packs, see the Comprehensive Resource Pack guide.

Setting up a Sound Directory

Now that the resource pack has been created, it's time to set up a place for our sound files.

  1. In File Explorer, navigate to the com.mojang folder.
  2. Open the development_resource_packs folder.
  3. Open custom_sound_pack.
  4. Create a folder called sounds.

When you're finished, your file structure will look like this:

Visual representation of the file structure for custom sounds.

Finding the Right Sound

The stage is set, and now it's time to get your custom sound ready! For our example we will be using Audacity, however any audio processing software will work as long as it can export files in a .OGG format.

You can either record a sound using your audio software, or use the software to open a sound that has been saved to your computer. Once your file is open in the audio software, it needs to be exported as a .OGG file. This can be done in Audacity by navigating to File > Export > Export as OGG.

For this tutorial, we’ll export a custom sound file with the name chestopen.ogg (you’ll see why, later).

If you'd like an example sound file to use, download this sample .OGG file.

Housing Your Sound

Congratulations, things are moving along nicely. You have a sound to replace, a new sound ready, and your resource pack is set up. Now it's time to figure out where your sound will live.

From here, you COULD scroll through the list of every Minecraft sound and find the sound file for a chest opening. Instead, we recommend using CTRL+F to find the file. For our example, the file we are looking for is the chestopen file; it happens to be located at sounds/random/chestopen.

Now we know where to place our custom sound file. Navigate to com.mojang > development_resource_packs > custom_sound_pack > sounds. In the sounds folder, create a new folder named random and place your custom chestopen.ogg file into it.

Testing Your Sound

The hard work is over, and now it's time to the test our custom sound! In order to test our sound, create a test world with your custom_sound_pack enabled and cheats turned ON, which will allow you to use the /give command.

  1. Open the chat box
  2. Type the following command: /give @s chest

Opening the chest should result in your custom sound playing. If that doesn't happen, some troubleshooting may be needed. Some common steps include:

  • Checking your file structure
  • Checking the file type of your custom sound file

Next Steps

Congratulations, you have successfully added a custom sound to your world, and now create a world that sounds the way you want to hear. You can make blocks that squeak, swords that apologize when you attack with them, or a world where everything is voiced by YOU! As always, the only limit is what you can imagine.