Sign Plates: Letters & Symbols

Check out the gallery for more use case examples

This lightweight mod adds decorative sign plates that can be placed in any orientation, on any side of a block.  They’re perfect for labeling things and building text that can actually be read from afar. No more spending hours trying to spell things out with custom banners!

Note for Fabric 1.20.1: If you’re using Sodium, you’ll also need Indium.

Customization

Right-click a placed sign plate to open the Sign Plate Designer. Choose backgrounds, frames, and symbols independently, then customize the symbol’s color, emission, and the plate’s light level.

Preview your changes before applying them. Any required materials are shown next to the Apply button, while changing symbols is always free. You can use Copy and Paste to transfer a design to another sign plate. Each element also has a None option, allowing you to hide the background, frame, or symbol entirely.

• Waxing: Use Honeycomb to seal a Sign Plate and prevent accidental editing. Right-click with an Axe to remove the wax.
• Silk Touch: Break a Sign Plate with Silk Touch to preserve its design and settings, including its waxed state. Breaking it normally drops an empty, stackable Sign Plate instead.

Color, Emission & Glow

Emission - Toggle this on to make the symbol & frame appear bright in the dark. This affects the appearance without lighting up the surrounding area. Enabling it costs 1 glow ink sac.

Glow - Choose from four settings to control how much light the plate emits. Costs glowstone dust.

Color - Change the symbol’s color using dyes.

When Dye Depot is installed, its 16 additional colors are also available for symbol tinting, colored frames, and concrete backgrounds, giving you even more customization options.

You can also right-click a sign plate with a sponge to remove its color, emission, and glow effects.

All current symbol designs

Colored lighting note:

The mod itself does of course not add colored lighting to vanilla Minecraft. Colored light emission depends on your shaderpack. Known shader setups that can display colored lighting with glowing tinted Sign Plates:

• Complementary Reimagined + Euphoria Patches, with Euphoria Patches' ACT + SSBL + Dynamic Lighting Support option enabled
• Rethinking Voxels
• Possibly other shaderpacks with colored lighting support

Crafting

Craft sign plates easily using iron ingots and deepslate,

Pre-v1.2.0 versions

Extensive per-element customization is only available in v1.2.0+ reworked versions of the mod.
In earlier versions: 

• Right-click a placed plate with a dye to color it or a glow ink sac to make it glow.
• Instead of the Sign Plate Designer GUI, use a stonecutter to switch between sign plate designs.

This mod adds a ton of new decorative sign plates that can be placed in any orientation, on any side of a block. They are perfect for labeling things and for writing text that can actually be read from afar. No more spending hours trying to spell things out with custom banners.

The mod is also very lightweight. Its textures stay within Minecraft’s normal 16×16 format, the block models use shared base model logic, and hidden faces are culled when placed against walls.

Update v1.1.0 - Tint & Glow

You can now dye Sign Plates and make them glow using Glow Ink Sacs.
The mod also includes support for Dye Depot mod's colors!

Colored variants use Minecraft’s tinting system to stay lightweight. Per-part coloring was considered, but would likely require block entities and hurt performance/long-distance rendering.

Colored lighting note:

The mod itself does not add true colored lighting to vanilla Minecraft. Colored light emission depends on your shaderpack. Known shader setups that can display colored lighting with glowing tinted Sign Plates:

• Complementary Reimagined + Euphoria Patches, with Euphoria Patches' ACT + SSBL + Dynamic Lighting Support option enabled
• Rethinking Voxels
• Possibly other shaderpacks with colored lighting support