A cape texture is 2,048 pixels and only 372 of them are ever drawn
The file is 64×32, the cape lives in a 22×17 corner, 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. Everything else in the file is ignored, and 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.
Everything outside 22 × 17 is dead space
The remaining 1,676 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 out of the corner 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. A cape design is therefore never only a cape design.
The two do not read the same way, though — a cape hangs as one flat 10 × 16 panel, and elytra spread it across two wings. A pattern that sits nicely down the middle of your back is exactly the pattern that gets pulled apart when the wings open. Check both previews before committing to a design; the file is shared, the geometry is not.