Color

Text in StarCraft can be formatted to a certain extent. By placing control characters in front of text, you can modify the way that text is displayed. Most control characters affect color, though some affect alignment. Their effects tend to stop when a line break, word wrap point, or other control character is encountered. Third-party map editors allow mappers to insert these control characters into various places.

Comprehensive list

In-game formatting

These are the control characters in-game. They affect all in-game text, including Mission Objectives. Notably, the "Grey" and "Invisible" characters will override all subsequent control characters until their effects are stopped by a line break.

Line breaks do not stop control characters in Mission Objectives. Among other things, this means that invisible and grey control characters in Mission Objectives will affect all text that comes after them, up to the end of the string.

0x01 - Use Default (Cyan)
0x02 - Cyan
0x03 - Yellow
0x04 - White
0x05 - Grey
0x06 - Red
0x07 - Green
0x08 - Red (P1)
0x09 - Tab
0x0A - Newline
0x0B - Invisible
0x0C - Remove beyond (large font), newline (small font)
0x0E - Blue (P2)
0x0F - Teal (P3)
0x10 - Purple (P4)
0x11 - Orange (P5)
0x12 - Right Align
0x13 - Center Align
0x14 - Invisible
0x15 - Brown (p6)
0x16 - White (p7)
0x17 - Yellow (p8)
0x18 - Green (p9) 
0x19 - Brighter Yellow (p10)
0x1A - Cyan
0x1B - Pinkish (p11)
0x1C - Dark Cyan (p12) 
0x1D - Greygreen
0x1E - Bluegrey
0x1F - Turquoise

Menu formatting

These control characters are for the pregame lobby. Note that due to patch 1.14, alignment characters and line breaks in map titles make games unjoinable, and no control codes function in Force names.

Interestingly, the characters that show up as black on Windows end up being the most colorful hues on Macs.

0x01 - Mimick(Default: Cyan)
0x02 - Cyan
0x03 - Green
0x04 - Light Green
0x05 - Grey
0x06 - White
0x07 - Red
0x08 - Black
0x09 - Tab
0x0A - Newline
0x0B - Invisible
0x0C - Remove beyond
0x0E - Black
0x0F - Black
0x10 - Black
0x11 - Black
0x12 - Right Align
0x13 - Center Align
0x14 - Invisible
0x15 - Black
0x16 - Black
0x17 - Black
0x18 - Black
0x19 - Black
0x1A - Black/Cyan?
0x1B - Black
0x1C - Black

Third-party map editors

Though third-party map editors support the insertion of control codes, their implementations vary. X-tra Edit shows the characters next to text windows; they must be copied and pasted into fields manually. StarForge uses buttons to insert the characters. SCMDraft 2 uses small codes consisting of the control character's hex code (such as 0E) wrapped in angle brackets (<0E>).

Extended player colors

In addition to text colors, some third-party map editors allow the use of abnormal player colors in maps. SCMDraft 2's implementation is particularly easy; simply type a number into the player color fields, instead of selecting a color name.

Unfortunately, these color palettes vary between patches and operating systems (because they're technically not color palettes at all; they're random data that the game is being tricked into reading as color palettes). Because of this variability, programs have been made that allow mappers to preview and save colors. One such utility is PColor [1], by FaRTy1billion. PColor allows mappers to choose a unit, a tileset, and a player color. It then displays what that unit will look like when the map is played with the currently installed version of StarCraft. Another utility (with fewer features) is Colors 1.14 [2], which allows a color to be picked, copied, and pasted into SCMDraft 2 and StarForge.

One of the most popular extended player colors is black. However, due to differences in how these colors look on different operating systems, nearly all black colors will only appear black for some players, while appearing as a broken color for many other players.

The player color 138 is the only known color which appears as a perfect black across all operating systems.