What is WAILA?

Waila is a Minecraft mod, and an acronym. It stands for “what am I looking at?”. It shows you, on the screen, what you are looking at.

How do I move it?

By default, it starts in the top center of the screen. This is fine, but some people (like me) want to move it around for various reasons. The kicker is there isn’t much documentation for how to do this. So, here you go.

1) Find Minecraft

First, goto your minecraft install directory. Unfortunately this is harder than it sounds. If you are using Technic launcher then on macos or linux it should be located in .technic in your home directory. On windows it is probably in %appdata%\Technic though I’m not positive.

The easiest way is to launch Minecraft, then click “Options” then “Resource Packs” and then “Open resource pack folder”. This will put you in your minecraft directories resourcepacks folder. Just move up one directory from there and you are in the install.

2) Open Waila.cfg

From the base directory open the “config” folder and then open “Waila.cfg” with your favorite text editor (not word, something for plain text like notepad, textedit, or vi). You will see a general configs section that looks like this:

 general {
         I:waila.cfg.alpha=80
         I:waila.cfg.bgcolor=1048592
         I:waila.cfg.fontcolor=10526880
         I:waila.cfg.gradient1=5243135
         I:waila.cfg.gradient2=2621567
         I:waila.cfg.heartsperline=20
         B:waila.cfg.keybind=true
         B:waila.cfg.liquid=false
         I:waila.cfg.maxhpbeforetext=40
         B:waila.cfg.metadata=false
         B:waila.cfg.newfilters=true
         I:waila.cfg.posx=5000
         I:waila.cfg.posy=100
         I:waila.cfg.scale=100
         B:waila.cfg.show=true
         B:waila.cfg.showmode=true
}

In it you want to use look at the posx, posy and scale options. The screen for purposes of this document is a 10000×10000 grid with 0,0 being the top left. So, to move waila to the top left you would change posx to 0 (posx=0). To make waila’s display half the size it is change scale=100 to scale=50. To move waila to the bottom right, use posx=10000, posy=9900.

Save the file, and close and reopen Minecraft and that’s it.

3) Backup the file

Make a copy of your Waila.cfg file. Anytime your modpack updates it may overwrite this file with the one in the modpack and once you have things configured just the way you like them this can be irritating, so backup jus tin case.