Minecraft wiki entry for Creating_a_resource_pack, associated text: If you plan on editing multiple resources, or to help ease of access, you may want to save a copy of the vanilla resources in an accessible location in case some things rely on other files within the directory. To do this, you need to navigate to the vanilla resources file by opening the versions folder inside the .minecraft directory. You should see a list of numbered folders, which correspond to versions that you've loaded or used in the past. Open the folder corresponding to the version you want for your resource pack (in this tutorial it would be 1.18) and extract the JAR file located inside, which can be done by right clicking the file and selecting a file archiver from the "Open With" option. You may want to save this in an accessible location for future reference, as certain tasks such as modifying block models require textures in addition to the model files. If you do not have a program that can open .jar files simply change the extension from .jar to .zip.