A cape texture is 2,048 pixels and the cape itself draws only 372 of them
The file is 64×32, the cape lives in a 22×17 corner, the elytra in the block beside it, and the side people actually see is 160 pixels — under 8% of the image. Plus the one-pixel offset that catches everyone.
A Minecraft cape texture is a 64 × 32 PNG — 2,048 pixels. The cape uses 372 of them, the elytra read another 520 from the block beside it, and the rest of the file is ignored. The part a player actually looks at is smaller still.
The six regions
| region | position | size | pixels |
|---|---|---|---|
| outside | (1, 1) | 10 × 16 | 160 |
| inside | (12, 1) | 10 × 16 | 160 |
| top | (1, 0) | 10 × 1 | 10 |
| bottom | (11, 0) | 10 × 1 | 10 |
| left | (0, 1) | 1 × 16 | 16 |
| right | (11, 1) | 1 × 16 | 16 |
| total | 372 |
That is 18.2% of the file. The outside face — the only one anybody sees while you walk — is 160 pixels, or 7.8% of the image you are editing.
The whole thing fits in a 22 × 17 box in the top-left corner. Within even that box, only two pixels go unused: (0, 0) and (21, 0), the two corners of the top row that neither the top strip nor the bottom strip reaches.
Outside the cape and the elytra block, the file is dead space
The elytra take a 24 × 22 block starting at (22, 0), right beside the cape. The remaining 1,156 pixels are not a second cape, a mask, or a reserved area. They are nothing. You can leave them transparent, fill them with your signature, or paste in a photograph — the game reads six rectangles for the cape, six more for the elytra, and ignores the rest of the file.
This is worth knowing mainly because it cuts the problem down. "Design a cape" sounds like designing a 64 × 32 image. It is designing a 10 × 16 rectangle, twice — front and back — plus a four-pixel-wide border of trim.
The one-pixel offset that catches everyone
Look at where top and bottom sit:
- top spans x 1–10, directly above the outside face
- bottom spans x 11–20
The outside face is x 1–10 and the inside face is x 12–21. So the top strip lines up with the outside face, and the bottom strip lines up with neither — it sits one pixel left of the inside face.
That single-column shift is the most common way a hand-drawn cape comes out wrong. Selecting the inside face's column range and painting the strip above it puts the bottom edge one pixel out, which shows up in game as a hairline of the wrong colour along the bottom hem. It is invisible in the editor because the strip is one pixel tall.
The proportions are not what the folded texture suggests
The visible cape is 10 wide and 16 tall — 1.6 times taller than it is wide. Laid out flat in the texture, the outside and inside faces sit side by side, so the pair reads as a 20 × 16 landscape block and it is easy to design for that shape by accident.
Anything centred across both faces will be split down the middle by the fold. A pattern has to be composed inside a single 10 × 16 half, or mirrored deliberately across the two.
The same file is also your elytra
One texture serves both: the preview on this page wears it as a cape or as elytra from the same image, because that is how the game uses it — unless your account supplies a separate elytra texture, which then wins. A cape design is therefore never only a cape design.
The two do not read the same pixels, though. The cape hangs from the 10 × 16 panel at (1, 1); the elytra read their own 24 × 22 block at (22, 0), mirrored onto both wings. A design painted only on the cape panel leaves the elytra blank. Check both previews before committing to a design; the file is shared, the regions are not.