Particles

Particles are 2D sprites that are there to spice up the look of Minecraft. They're all usually rendered as a billboard, to always face the player. Internally they're handled as entities.

Named Particles

These particles are reused for several things, and are indexed with a string ID.

ID/Name	Appearance	Usage
bubble		Usually spawned when entities are in water
smoke	Rising smoke	Used by torches, fireballs, furnaces, mob spawners and lava, but also primed TNT and wolf taming
note	Colored musical note	Used by note blocks
portal	Purple smoke	Spawned around Nether portal blocks
explode	Smoke	Used by explosions, but also as the smoke that appears when entities die
flame		Used by torches, furnaces and mob spawners
lava		Used by lava, usually trailed by smoke
footstep		Unused, lingers on the ground for quite a while
splash	Rain particle	Used by boats, wet wolves shaking themselves off and for fish when fishing
largesmoke	Rising smoke plume	Used by fire, lava, furnace minecarts and water buckets when placed in the Nether
reddust		Used by powered redstone components
snowballpoof	Snowball pieces	Used by snowballs
snowshovel		Unused
slime	Slimeball pieces	Spawned when slimes land on the ground
heart		Used when a wolf is tamed

NOTE

snowballpoof, slime and thrown eggs all use the same function under the hood. They just use different item textures.

Misc particles

Some particles are not spawned via a string ID, though two of these are likely oversights, or they required special handling that the string ID particle spawning system didn't provide.

• Lava spawns smoke when it's raining
• All sky-visible, non-air blocks can spawn rain splashes when it's raining
• Item pick-ups are treated as particles when they're flying towards you

Block Destruction

Block destruction particles are handled slightly differently. The game will spawn 64 particles, evenly spread out within the space the block occupied.

A random face is chosen as the source for the texture of each particle.

Further reading

• Effect Packet