Bedrock has no standalone cape pack — a cape only ships attached to a skin
There is no cape-only .mcpack format. Every cape must be paired with a skin entry that names it, which is why a cape pack is really a skin pack with an extra PNG per entry.
On Java a cape is a separate thing from a skin. On Bedrock it is not: there is no cape pack format. A cape is a field on a skin entry, so distributing a cape means distributing a skin that wears it.
What that forces
A cape pack is a skin pack whose entries each name a cape texture. The manifest, the skins.json and the lang file are identical to any other skin pack — the only difference is one extra key per entry and one extra PNG in the zip.
The consequences are structural, not cosmetic:
- You cannot ship a cape on its own. Every cape needs a skin to hang from, even if that skin
is one you do not care about.
- A cape is not selectable independently in game. Picking the cape means picking the skin
entry it belongs to. Two capes on one skin is not a thing you can express.
- N skins × M capes is N × M entries, not N + M. Offering three capes across four skins means
twelve entries in the pack, each with its own key, its own name in the lang file, and its own pair of PNGs.
That last point is the one that bites when a pack grows. Cape packs get large quickly, and the size is multiplicative rather than additive.
The two textures are different sizes
A skin is 64 × 64 (or legacy 64 × 32). A cape is 64 × 32, always. They are not interchangeable and the builder rejects a skin at cape dimensions and vice versa.
Within that 64 × 32 cape file, the visible face is the 10 × 16 block at (1, 1) — everything else is the back, the edges, and padding. The preview here crops to exactly that rectangle when showing you which cape is which, because at thumbnail size the surrounding padding is most of the image and tells you nothing.
Slim and classic still apply
Each entry carries its own model, detected from the skin's fourth arm column the same way a plain skin pack does. So a cape pack has to get the slim/classic call right per entry as well — the cape does not change how the arms are read, and a wrong model here shows up exactly as it does anywhere else: an Alex skin with Steve's arms, wearing the right cape.
Practical shape
If your goal is really "give people this cape", the pack is a delivery mechanism rather than the product. Pair it with the plainest skin that makes sense, name the entry after the cape rather than the skin, and accept that a player choosing it is choosing both.
If your goal is a set of matched looks — a skin and a cape designed together — then Bedrock's model is actually the right one, and the pairing that feels like a limitation is the feature.