Descriptions

description is the most awkward field in pack.mcmeta. It can be a plain string, a component object, an array of components, or a translatable component — and in the format-1 era it carried legacy § colour codes.

The library keeps it raw and adds no interpretation of its own.

Plain text

metadata.pack().plainTextDescription();

This walks the component tree, concatenating text and extra in order. For a nested component:

{
  "text": "Shiny ",
  "color": "gold",
  "extra": [ { "text": "Pack", "color": "aqua" } ]
}

assertEquals("Shiny Pack", metadata.pack().plainTextDescription());

The tree

Styling is preserved on a sealed JsonValue owned by this library — not a Jackson type, so shading Jackson in your plugin cannot break callers.

JsonValue.JsonObject description =
        assertInstanceOf(JsonValue.JsonObject.class, metadata.pack().description());

assertEquals(new JsonValue.JsonString("gold"), description.get("color"));

The variants are JsonString, JsonNumber, JsonBoolean, JsonNull, JsonArray and JsonObject, so a switch over them is exhaustive. toJsonString() serialises any of them back to JSON.

Legacy § codes

Two different things get called "formatting", and the library treats them differently:

• Legacy §c codes live inside string values. They are preserved verbatim — plainText() will hand them back to you untouched, and a LEGACY_FORMATTING_CODES diagnostic tells you they are present.
• Structured styling — "color": "gold", "bold": true — has no § at all. Those stay as fields on the tree.

assertEquals("§cLegacy §rPack", identified.metadata().pack().plainTextDescription());

The library will not synthesise §c from "color": "red", nor strip § codes to make output tidy. Both would be inventing or discarding information. Rendering is your decision, and the raw data is there to make it.

Translatable components

plainText() prefers text, then fallback, then the translate key itself:

{ "translate": "pack.name", "fallback": "My Pack" }   ->  "My Pack"
{ "translate": "pack.name" }                          ->  "pack.name"

No translation is attempted — the library has no locale data and will not guess.