Sound Subtitle Colors

Vanilla subtitles show every sound in the same white text. In a busy cave or a fight, you read the words before you know whether it was a zombie, a cow, a chest or the rain.

Sound Subtitle Colors changes the color of each subtitle line by what made the sound. Nothing else changes: no new overlay, no menu, no setting.

Where to look

Turn on subtitles (Options > Accessibility Settings > Closed Captions on 1.21.11). They appear at the bottom right as usual. Each line, and the arrow beside it, now has the color of its sound type:

• Hostile (zombie, skeleton, creeper): vermillion
• Neutral (cow, sheep, most passive mobs): yellow
• Players: sky blue
• Blocks (chests, doors, furnaces): orange
• Weather (rain, thunder): blue
• Ambient (cave noises): bluish green
• Voice (sounds the game puts in its “Voice” group; rare in normal play): reddish purple

Example: a zombie and a cow walking nearby both say “Footsteps”, but one line is vermillion and the other is yellow. (Checked in game on Minecraft 1.21.11.)

What it does for you

• You can tell the kind of sound from the color first, and read the words only when you need to.
• The colors come from the Okabe-Ito palette, which is designed to be told apart by people with common forms of color blindness. The Weather blue is brightened for more contrast on the dark subtitle background. We checked by calculation that this brighter blue stays apart from the other six colors under normal vision, protanopia and deuteranopia. We have not tested the colors with players who have these conditions.
• Sounds that are not about “where did that come from” (master, music, records, UI) keep the normal white.
• It works with the normal subtitle display. Take the mod out and subtitles go back to white.
• Client-side only. Nothing to install on the server, no network connections.

What it does not do

• The colors are fixed. There is no config file or color picker. If you want to choose your own colors, use a subtitle mod that has a config.
• Villagers’ sounds are usually shown as Neutral (yellow), not as Voice, because of how the game classifies them.
• We have not tested it together with other subtitle mods.

Versions

Minecraft 26.3: version 0.1.1 (needs Java 25). Minecraft 1.21.11: version 0.1.1. Both have the same seven colors.

Requirements

Fabric Loader 0.19.0+ and Fabric API. Pick the file for your Minecraft version.

Source: https://github.com/hullspark/fabric-mods

Disclosure: this mod was developed with AI assistance (Claude) and reviewed by the author. It does not reuse code or assets from other mods. It does not collect or transmit any data.