For many years, and for many Minecrafters, Miners Need Cool Shoes was the go-to, best, and easiest tool for skin creation and sharing. Unfortunately, however, around January of 2023, the site at needcoolshoes.com would go dark, and, as of the date of writing this, never return.

The community had lost a powerful and useful resource, and had to resort to using either a semi-functional archive of the site, from the Wayback Machine, or use one of the other skin creation tools, many of which had little support for layers, one of the core features of Miners Need Cool Shoes.

As well as losing such a powerful editor, the community also lost an expansive archive of skins, dating back over 10 years. The site had a loyal community of talented skin artists, and fostered an environment of sharing and remixing, reminiscent of sites like Scratch, or the open source movement as a whole.

NeedCoolerShoes aims to restore, improve and replace the old editor. Work is going in to slowly replacing all assets with original and open source ones, such that one day the site can be released as free software. If you would be interesting in helping out on the project either making assets, coding the Javascript, or working with the Rails backend, contact us through the on-site form.