Hidden Display

hidden_display decides what a player who has not unlocked the stage sees in place of the real item. It changes nothing about whether the item is locked — only how it presents itself. Once the stage is unlocked, everything displays normally again.

In the editor

Not a tab — it belongs to the stage rather than to one lock category. Stage Settings, the button on the stage's own screen, holds it as the Display card: the two modes as dropdowns, their replacement texts as fields, and the lock-hint switch.

Per-entry overrides are set where the entry is: right-click the item, tag, mod or fluid in its list and pick Text Override.

No Text Override in the menu?

It only appears while this stage's name_mode or tooltip_mode is set to "replace" — with both off or hidden there is no text for an entry to override, so the menu leaves it out rather than offering something that would do nothing.

{
  "hidden_display": {
    "name_mode": "replace",
    "name_text": "???",
    "tooltip_mode": "replace",
    "tooltip_text": "Unlock the Stone Age to reveal this item.",
    "show_lock_hints": false
  }
}

Key	Type	Default	What it does
name_mode	String	"off"	"off" — name unchanged. "hidden" — name is cleared. "replace" — name becomes name_text.
name_text	String	""	The replacement name, used when name_mode is "replace".
tooltip_mode	String	"off"	"off" — tooltip unchanged. "hidden" — extra tooltip lines are stripped. "replace" — tooltip becomes tooltip_text.
tooltip_text	String	""	The replacement tooltip. \n starts a new line.
show_lock_hints	Boolean	true	With false, the padlock icon and the "Locked" hint line are left off the tooltip.

Taking full control of the tooltip

show_lock_hints on its own does very little — turning it off simply removes the padlock line and leaves whatever the item would otherwise show. It earns its place in combination with tooltip_mode: "replace", which together is the only way to decide every line a locked player reads:

{
  "hidden_display": {
    "name_mode": "replace",
    "name_text": "Ancient Relic",
    "tooltip_mode": "replace",
    "tooltip_text": "Recovered from the ruins.\nIts purpose is not yet clear.",
    "show_lock_hints": false
  }
}

Without show_lock_hints: false, the mod's own "requires stage X" line is appended underneath and gives the answer away.

Overriding it for a single entry

Entries in items and tags can carry their own name_text and tooltip_text, which take precedence over the stage-wide ones:

{
  "hidden_display": {
    "name_mode": "replace",
    "name_text": "???",
    "tooltip_mode": "replace",
    "tooltip_text": "Not yet discovered."
  },
  "items": [
    "minecraft:iron_ingot",
    {
      "id": "minecraft:netherite_ingot",
      "name_text": "A Heavy Metal",
      "tooltip_text": "Heavier than gold, and it does not burn."
    }
  ]
}

Only the text is overridden, never the mode. name_mode and tooltip_mode in hidden_display still decide whether replacing happens at all — an entry with a name_text and a stage whose name_mode is "off" shows the real name.

When two stages both change the same item

Two locked stages can both set a hidden display for the same item. The one that matches it more closely wins: an entry for the item itself beats a tag or a mod. When both match equally well, the stage that sorts first by folder path and id wins, and global stages come before individual ones. The "you still need" lines in the tooltip list the stages in that same order.

Before 6.1.0 such a tie was decided at random and could flip after a reload.

??? is the mod's own word for "unknown"

hidden_display is off by default, so nothing is renamed until a stage asks for it. But if you want a replacement name that matches the rest of the mod, use ??? — that is what the built-in lock messages ("??? This item is still unknown to you ???") and the Stage Graph's hidden-stage node already say. It is a deliberate house style rather than an unfinished placeholder.

What hidden display does not cover

An item whose entry narrows the lock down to a single action — say recipe alone — still shows as hidden and still carries the "requires stage X" tooltip. Both statements describe that the item belongs to a stage, which stays true however narrow the gate is. Everything that actually refuses an action reads the action list; the two display surfaces deliberately do not.

See also

• Unlock Actions — narrowing which interactions a lock covers.
• visual.toml — the server-wide defaults for lock messages, tooltips and the padlock overlay, which apply to every stage that does not override them.