Hide Names — The Minecraft Mod Nobody Asked For
One mixin. Zero nametags. Infinite paranoia.
A Fabric mod for Minecraft 1.21 that removes player nametags — built with Java 21 and SpongePowered Mixin to make hide-and-seek actually playable. Thirteen lines of bytecode surgery.
Let's talk about a problem so stupid it shouldn't exist.
You fire up Minecraft with your mates. Someone suggests hide-and-seek. Everyone scatters. Brilliant — except there's a floating white nametag above every player's head, visible through walls, across biomes, through the very fabric of spacetime. Mojang, in their infinite wisdom, decided you should always know exactly where everyone is.
Hide-and-seek is now just seek.
So I built a mod that removes them. One job. Thirteen lines.
What It Actually Does
Hide Names is a client-side Fabric mod for Minecraft 1.21 that strips player nametags from rendering. Compasses, maps, and every other tracking tool still work — only the floating text above heads is gone. No config screens, no settings panels, no twelve-page wiki. Install it and nametags vanish.
Thirteen Lines of Bytecode Surgery
Minecraft's rendering pipeline doesn't expose a polite setNametagVisible(false) API. The nametag is drawn deep inside EntityRenderer.renderLabelIfPresent() — a method responsible for label rendering on every entity in the game. There's no event hook, no config flag, no toggle.
The mod uses SpongePowered Mixin — a bytecode manipulation framework that lets you inject code directly into Minecraft's compiled classes at launch. The injection targets the very first instruction of the label method. If the entity is a player, the call is cancelled before a single vertex is written.
Here's the entire core:
@Mixin(EntityRenderer.class)
public abstract class EntityRendererMixin {
@Inject(
method = "renderLabelIfPresent",
at = @At("HEAD"),
cancellable = true
)
private void hidePlayerNametags(
Entity entity, Text text, MatrixStack matrices,
VertexConsumerProvider vertexConsumers,
int light, float distance, CallbackInfo ci
) {
if (entity instanceof PlayerEntity) {
ci.cancel();
}
}
}@Inject at HEAD means the hook fires before any original code runs. ci.cancel() aborts the method entirely — no label computation, no buffer writes, no draw call. Clean removal at the bytecode level. Mob labels, item names, everything else renders as normal.
Why Mixin and Not Just an Override?
The alternative is overriding the entire renderer class. Ship a full copy of Minecraft's source, paste in your change, hope nobody else touches the same class. The moment a second mod does the same thing — and they will — one of you breaks.
Mixin injection is surgical. It modifies only the bytes it needs, coexists with other mods targeting the same class, and doesn't require shipping Mojang's renderer source. The tradeoff is complexity — understanding injection points, callback signatures, and the somewhat arcane @At targeting system. For a mod this size it's overkill in learning curve. But it's the correct approach for anything that needs to survive across versions and play nicely with others.
The Stack
| Runtime | Java 21 |
| Mod Loader | Fabric API 0.102.0 |
| Minecraft | 1.21 |
| Build | Gradle 8.14 + Fabric Loom |
| Injection | SpongePowered Mixin (bytecode-level) |
| Licence | MIT — open source |
Project Layout
Even for a small mod, structure matters. One mixin today becomes five tomorrow.
src/main/java/net/mc121/hide_names_fabric/
├── HideNamesFabric.java // Mod entrypoint & logger
├── client/
│ └── NametagHiderClientMod.java // Client initialiser
└── mixin/
└── EntityRendererMixin.java // The magicThe mixin configuration lives in hide-names-fabric.mixins.json, which tells Fabric Loader which classes to transform at launch. The mod entrypoint registers with the Fabric lifecycle, and the client initialiser handles client-specific setup — future-proofing for when the feature set grows beyond a single injection.
The CI Pipeline
Every push and pull request triggers a GitHub Actions build running on Ubuntu 24.04 — JDK 21 validation, Gradle wrapper verification, full compilation, and artifact capture. Nothing merges without a green build.
What's Next
The mod works. It's also deliberately minimal. The roadmap includes command toggles for server operators, friend and team lists so allies can still see each other, and version ports from 1.20 upward. Development is paused whilst I focus on .NET at university — but the codebase is open, documented, and MIT-licenced. PRs are read.