Namespaces

Namespaces are identifiers that mark content ownership. You can think of them as folders. Namespaces are helpful because they keep naming conflicts from happening.

Namespaces in addon creation can essentially be thought of as "the part to the left of the colon". For example, minecraft is the namespace of minecraft:zombie. The general form is namespace:name.

As a concrete example of why namespaces are helpful, let's imagine you create a new Mob. You name it minecraft:shark, not aware that you should create your own namespace for custom content. Next year, Mojang decides to add sharks into the game! Now there is a naming conflict since there are two definitions of minecraft:shark. Your addon will break.

If you had instead used your_namespace:shark, the naming conflict wouldn't have happened.

Picking a namespace

A suitable namespace is unique to you. Something like mob or cars or content or custom would be a bad namespace since another developer might come up with the same namespace as you.

A suitable namespace is short. You will be writing your namespace a LOT, so the shorter, the better. george_carlin_the_comedian would be a lousy namespace for this reason.

For personal projects, I recommend a convenient version of your player name, and for commercial projects, I recommend a suitable version of the company name.

Some good examples:

gcarlin
sirlich
cubeworld
bworks

DO NOT USE minecraft or minecon as a namespace unless editing a vanilla file. Not only is it a terrible idea, but Minecraft reserves these, and it won't even work.

Where to use namespaces?

In short, you should use namespaces as often as you can.

For starters, you should use a namespace when adding custom entities to the game.

sirlich:shark is much better than shark.

It would be best if you also used namespaces for components and events. Just like Mojang uses minecraft:pig_saddled you should use namespace:my_mob_event, and namespace:my_component_group.

It would be best if you also used namespaces in animation controllers, render controllers, and animations.

For example: controller.animation.namespace.entity_name.action is better than controller.animation.my_action.