Minecraft Forums

Time investment is not equal to diffiiculty, and certainly not equal to fun.

Turning on a machine and going afk next to it is not fun.

I thought that this one would be obvious. People do not play games with the intention of not playing those games. If your mod asks players to afk, then your mod is doing it wrong. Honestly, with furnaces, vanilla minecraft already has too much of this, and it's on my personal list of top ten flaws in the game, albiet, by no means #1.

But y'know what's worse than afk?

Having to turn a little handle around and around, like in AE2's grindstone, and yes, technically Calculator's hand-cranked generator, but that thing is entirely designed with the breaking handle and suchlike to try to make you use other power gen as soon as you can.

I mean, you can't even do anything else unless you tape down the right mouse button and have your phone with you.

Basic game design, people. :\

Botania is a weird case, as it had some afk machinery, (passive generation flowers) and removed it. The question is, is that better or worse? On the one hand, now you need to play the game. Botania's not asking you to stop playing minecraft and go watch tv. On the other hand, many of the alternative methods, such as the dandylifeon, no matter how cool they start out, fairly quickly become placing blocks and waiting for them to go away so you can place more, effectively becoming like turning a crank. It's hard to decide whether this is a really good thing or not, but opens up a fairly interesting discussion. I'm personally of the opinion that the whole mana system needs some major tweaking, but I have no idea what precisely to do to it.

And yes, the first type does include electricity generation. A large energy cost adds what exactly to the game? Maybe making a machine work a little better when it's really late game?

This is how I think that power systems really should go, although I'm really getting ahead of myself here:
-Machines clearly mention that they need to be hooked up to a generator in the tooltip.
-Cables allow you to connect multiple machines to one generator
-Generators have specfic numbers of machines they can power, shown clearly in the tooltip.
-Generators have specific conditions that need to be met that change their other stats depending (eg. geothermal generator can power more machines when next to more lava, or a solar generator won't do anything at night.)

-Generators, cables, and machines, have tiers, assuming you want that for your mod, outlined in the tooltips.
-Generators, if you want to get funky, maybe also can only power cables so far from them, or maybe can't power things from lower tiers. Again, outlined in tooltips.

My point is, and a lot of modders missed this one, from a gameplay perspective, there's no reason to make the player wait as long as the furnace does, and certainly not longer. While I'm willing to accept up to double the time a furnace takes to smelt one item, beyond that is just dumb, and as I've demenstrated, there are ways to make very intricate and interesting systems without making the player wait hours on end for their FRICKING DRACONIUM BLOCK TO STOP CHARGING SO THEY CAN FLIPPING USE IT IN THEIR GOSH DARN DRAGON HEART RITUAL OH MY BUTTS WHY DOES THIS SEEM LIKE A GOOD IDEA!?!?!

(GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. For example, what pops up when you right-click on a crafting table.)

No Guis works wonders for Botania. I can tell you that. And do you know why? Because a good portion of Botania's charm is how beautiful everything looks, sure, but that's not the real reason. The reason is the Lexica Botania. No other mod that I have used has had even half as good ingame documentation as Botania. And yes, Vaskii, that includes Psi.

The reason that this is so important is because GUIS make everything easier. And while, sure, you'll still probably need some pointers to figure them out, that's nothing compared to trying to do things without GUIs. This usually means right-clicking on specific parts of blocks, having to use swift left-clicks that won't even really work on creative mode, or even beyond that, dropping all sorts of things in various random places.

Because of this, unless you seriously massively overdocument it, it's going to be extremely hard to understand, particularly with item dropping mechanics, which usually need to be left alone for a certain amount of time, and always leave me wondering whether my items are going to just expire and nothing will happen at all. Because of this, so much time is spent looking at the ingame documentation's GUI, or even worse, an external webpage, that it's really not leaving the player with less GUI in their life at all, defeating the point, and making the process all the more annoying.

Finally, nobody really goes searching for guiless mods. It looks kinda nice when it happens, but GUIs are ultimately better for everybody. Vanilla minecraft is a great place to go to look for things to remember when coding mods, and in that vein, the note block is a great example of the maximum amount of utility you should ever add to a block without giving it a GUI.

And also, to bring up Botania again, really, what more do you want from 'no guis' than what that mod does?

We have seen big bombs in minecraft. We have seen projectile bombs. We have seem big projectile bombs.

It's all been done.

And no sane server owner is going to let those things be used.

Because they are incredible griefing tools, and not much good for anything else.

So, if you really have to put explosives or things that do a lot of block damage into your mod, just know that the work you're doing will only effect the tiny portion of your player-base that will never play on multiplayer servers with your mod, and decide to grief on a single-player world.

If that's really what you want to do, I'm not stopping you, but block damage is a really hard thing to justify using at all.

Have you beaten the enderdragon on Hardcore mode after playing through the whole game without dying once, spawning in nothing, with no mods, etc? No? Guess what? You're not the only one. I'm proud to say that I'm on the list of about 1000 minecraft players that have, but the vast majority have gotten nowhere close. I'm making a rule right now. You can't complain about how easy minecraft is without beating, not just the 1.9 upgraded ender dragon, but also the wither, on hardcore mode. (I actually ended up losing my own world to the wither, so that includes me. ) Minecraft is all about challenging yourself, so if that's not enough, maybe try fighting them both at once, or using no weapons beyond beds. My point is, minecraft has an actual win condition now, and I don't want to hear anybody complain about it who hasn't actually won the game. There are a ton of mods out there that try to make minecraft "Harder," and a lot of them, for example Hardcore Ender Expansion and Realistic Realism, are really good mods, but that doesn't change the fact that minecraft is extremely hard on its own, and doesn't really need the extra difficulty.

On the other side of the same coin though, why would I even install a dirt to diamonds mod?

There's no reason to program it if nobody will ever see it / understand it.

Documentation is honestly more important than content. If you don't believe me, you haven't seen my Fool's Gold mod. Furthermore, I have actually seen examples before of mods that documented something that wasn't in the mod, and nobody even noticed, and a few mods I've used have intentionally detailedly documented everything except one small detail to add a little secret feature to the mod.

Doccumentation is really important. I don't even need much to support this, because honestly, one would think it was intuitive.

Ingame documentation is ideal, but in some cases, particularly smaller mods, it just doesn't make sense. If you're mod is REALLY small, I have no doubt that the O.P. is enough, but outside of both scenarios, for midsized mods or large ones where ingame documentation is not an option, Wikia is a really good system for getting fairly coherent databases of minecraft stuff going.

The Lexica Botania in Botania, as well as Tinker's Construct 1's (and hopefully Tinker's Construct 2 as well once that's to a release state) books, are great examples of this. Or, if you're trying for something slightly different, electrical age has an interesting form of ingame documentation as well, although it still needs some kinks worked out.

I'm gonna say this once:
-1.7.10 has enough wonderful mods for it that there's plenty of reasons to mod for it, plus, updating from there usually takes a complete recode. Eww.

-1.9 is currently the most recent version, so go ahead and mod for it.

Don't mod for other versions of minecraft, unless you have stable, up to date, versions for both of those and no real plans for content for them. There are sorta weird kinda reasons that you might mod for 1.8, 1.8.9, or 1.6.4, but those versions are pretty much gone now, and if your latest version is for one of those, it's really time to switch to a new one.
If you are new to modding, start with the latest version you can, as what is done to mod minecraft is a really different monster with each version, and starting several versions behind can make it really hard to get modding on current things, leaving your mod in the dark ages forever.

If your mod has a material that's better than diamond, you need to justify that. An ore that's a little bit rarer is not justification

Two terrific examples of doing this correctly are Tinker's Construct, and Mekanism.

In Tinker's construct, there are ores that are better than diamond, which you find in the nether, which would not be reason enough for them to be better than diamond, except that to mine them, you need to go through the tech tree of Tcon, as no vanilla pickaxe can do it.

You'll need to go through all of the steps of setting up a tool forge, and a smeltary, and alloy together some alumite or knightslime, then form a pickaxe head from it, then affix it to a tool rod and a binding, then go to the nether and mine these ores, and on top of all that, to make the actual BEST material, you need to alloy both together.

Similarly, Mekanism's refined obsidian requires getting fairly far into the tech tree, and the alloying process includes diamonds to boot.

Both of these things are fine. It's a lot of effort.

What's not cool is making people simply able to find ores that are better. If it's done well it's sorta okayish, but really, it's vastly perferable to make your materials attainable through other methods, whether it's technology like IC2E's Irridium, magic, like Thaumic Tinker's Ichorium, or conquest, like the weapons and armor in Chocolate Quest, or heck, even whatever the heck is going on in magical crops, that's cool. The problem is when there are ores in the nether or overworld, that can be mined with diamond, that are just plain better than diamond.

Even that is better, though, than emerald or obsidian being better than diamond.

Yes, obsidian requires diamond to mine, but it's so easy to create, particularly after the nether gives you an infinite supply of easy lava, and you can actually place it, using buckets, before even finding your first diamond. Don't tier Obsidian after diamond.

And Emeralds? These are a little bit more irregular, but if you're not on multiplayer, it's not all that difficult to wander into a village, where emeralds are given to you in basically infinite supply, so long as you're not completely awful at working the villagers to your advantage, and on single-player and multiplayer alike, extreme hills biomes are fairly common, and emeralds are substantially more common than diamonds there. Alittle less rare than gold even.

MCreator has sort of attracted the crowd of modders who are too illiterate and unimaginitive to actually program anything, but the program itself is actually pretty usable (at least in the 1.8.9 version,) and if you're not planning on doing anything too extravagent or inventive, it can do the thing, and there are actually, albiet rarely, MCreator mods that can be judged on the standards of other mods.

I am seeing a lot of hate for MCreator on these forums, but just imagine what happens when they finally add in everything you would have conceivably done with your mod anyway. There'd barely even be a reason to invest the long hours into learning coding. Sounds good to me.

That said, I'm really only asking you not to be so aggressive towards MCreator. For the time being, coding is a much better alternative, and MCreator is almost impossible to troubleshoot problems with.

It's really important to look at vanilla minecraft a lot before modding minecraft. Actually play a survival world through the various boss fights, do a complex build on creative mode with lots of command blocks and redstone, and yes, also play some modded minecraft too, but this tab is called "vanilla."

The idea is, get a good idea of what vanilla minecraft does well, and what could use some work, before you start changing things.

What is or isn't good about vanilla has a lot to do with your opinions.
Me personally? I think the game is terrific up until you find your first diamond, and after you complete the end portal, but the rest needs work. Does that mean you agree?
Well, tell me, if someone else has an opinion, do you automatically agree with them? No? Then you can like or dislike whatever you like.
Vanilla is a really well crafted experience though, it can both provide examples on a lot of code, and also provide many insights into design in terms of the careful balance of complexity of everything, and many other similar things.

The other part to vanilla is when a mod tries for a vanilla feel.
I honestly am really bad at this and don't have much advice beyond that 90% of the vanilla feel is in how you do your textures. If you want to be vanillish, focus very carefully on how things are drawn in vanilla minecraft.

There are plenty reasons to do any of many things with your source code.
There are good reasons to leave it open for everyone.
There are good reasons to keep it to yourself. Which I actually have been doing so far

All I have to say here is, if you don't really care, opensource yourself. If there's even a glimmer of hope that someone can learn from your code and make the next great mod that you can't play enough of, do it.

This is a really little one, but ideally, if your mod adds ores, it should add 1-3. Anything more than that, and either the player is using a digital miner/automatic sieve and doesn't care, or they'll be stuck in the long and extremely agrovating quest for that one last ore that they need to finish the machinery they want.

If your mod already has a lot of ore, I don't really think you need to change it, but if you're developing a new mod, sythetic materials and alloys are the way to go.

Also, if you have a lot of ore, usually, that means that each individual ore has less actual use, and before long they just turn into random decoration for caves. Less ores makes them more valuable, and therefor gives them more reason to exist.

One of the biggest things that my friends and I look for when prospecting for mods is compatibility with other mods, particularly ones we're already using.

While big compatibility is pretty hard to do, ore dictionary entries take about a minute to enter, tops, and in the case of some materials, like steel, suddenly adds compatibility with something like 30 other mods.

First, let's take a close look at vanilla minecraft's two liquids, Lava and Water:

Water flows mildly quickly. A lot of it spawns in pools and rivers in the overworld. It adds ambiance to the world, looks pretty, and if you step inside of it, you will be able to hold your breath for a limited time, before you slowly start taking damage. It has a lot of interesting applications, such as water ladders or using its flow for automation. It dissipates roughtly as fast as it flows when the source block is removed, and it's found rarely underground. If placed in the nether, it goes away immidietly.

Lava flows more slowly, unless you are in the nether, in which case it moves a little faster than water^{[Citation Needed]} When you walk in, you catch fire and die quickly, but a potion of fire resistance allows you to cross relatively safely, although unlike water, you cannot swim in it. It spawns in huge lakes in the nether, and small pockets in the nether and overworld. It can be very useful in trap design, and will dissipate slowly when the source block is removed. Sometimes not at all.

When the two meet, depending on the many different configurations possible, they might form stone, cobblestone, or obsidian, depending on the configuration replacing water sources, lava sources, or flowing forms of either with said block, and sometimes even redstone due to what is probably a bug.

Now, why am I talking about this? Surely if you're modding minecraft, you get how water and lava work in the base game, right?

Well, yes and no. You know how they work, but, you don't really act on it.

Let's look at the fluids in a few mods now:

-In Minefactory - Reloaded, a huge variety of liquids are added. They are all either created artificially, or spawn in small puddles on the surface of the world. They act exactly like water, except giving seemingly random potion effects to the player when they enter, and sometimes flowing at very slightly different speeds. None of them really interact with other liquids in ways that water does not.

-Tinker's construct's liquid metals are all things that you shouldn't remove from your smeltary, because they work like less-useful lava that won't react with anything. Even with two metal source blocks right next to eachother. They don't move. Liquid slime is just water that spawns slimes.


Well, would you look at that. I explained the same amount of detail for every liquid in two mods that add upwards of 10 liquids, with about half the words it took me to describe what the vanilla ones do. What does that mean? Not much, but you'll notice they both fall really heavily into easy categorizations. Meanwhile, vanilla liquids, albiet there are only two, are vastly different from eachother, and clearly had a lot of thought go into them, and how they interact with one-another.

The mod liquids, really don't. Are these bad mods because of it? Much as I personally dislike this feature of MFR enough that I try to avoid using MFR, nope. MFR also does some pretty cool things, and TConstruct clearly has the bucketed liquids as mostly an afterthought, a little asthetic thing that makes the game prettier.

But let's talk about liquids in mods in general now, because there's something to say here. Have I ever seen a mod create a fluid that really satisfied me? Nope. Have I seen a mod get close? Yes. Several. Is it possible to make a liquid that's as "good" as the vanilla ones, or perhaps better? YOU BET YOUR FACE IT IS! Please be the person who makes that mod where I finally like a liquid. Please.

That said, here are four examples of mods getting 'close,' as it were to what I'd like to see. None of these are quite there, and I'm missing some things here that are also good examples, but I feel like with my otherwise negative state on this, it's good to have some things to point to and say "THIS ARE GUD! GRAWP WANT MORE!"

-Resonant ender. It fails at a lot of the things I'm looking for, but the thing that happens when you step in it, or throw in an item, is beautiful. Well done.

-Clockwork Phase is a mod that doesn't get a lot of attention, and it's sands of time are not anything to write home about, but the really fast flowing speed they show off, and the animated texture that makes it such a great hourglass metaphor make it stand out from the crowd, even if it's not 100% perfect.

-A few different mods have made liquids that flow up instead of down. That's really cool, but the liquids haven't really ever done anything too interesting, and the question of what happens at the top of the world hasn't gotten a satisfying answer yet.

-Industrialcraft 2 has Pahoehoe lava. The way that this stuff hardens into rock when it hasn't done any flowing in a while is an interesting mechanic that also kinda reflects how volcanoes actually work. The things that make me feel like this isn't qutie up to the vanilla standard are the fact that because it changes state so easily, it's almost worthless for building, and of course that it doesn't do anything wonderfully interesting when it interacts with other liquids.

What I'm saying is, the vanilla liquids are really cool, and if you want to be able to stand up to that standard, you really need to put a lot more thought into your liquids than most modders do. Imagine if one could alloy with the buckets of metals from Tcon, or if the slime water had a special flowing algorythm where it sort-of stuck to itself, allowing you to make actual liquid bridges. How cool could those things be?

As for machinery using liquids, there's not much to say. Foundary, Tinker's Construct, and Gregtech all use it for making materials in a similar manner to one another, which is pretty cool, and each take on it has its own unique and interesting extra things. Mekanism seems to make liquid and machinery work pretty well. In thermal expansion, it feels a little gratuitous at times, but not excessively so. Ender IO goes a little overboard with the Vat and suchlike, but again, not enough that it's really in any way a problem, and rotarycraft's employment of various oils for gearboxes is pretty cool. Every mod with fluid pipes (which is a lot) makes them slightly diferently, and never really BADLY.

Multiblocks can add a lot of immersion to the game and if you have something that makes sense to be a multiblock by all means do so. What you should avoid though is many different kinds of blocks in specific patterns.

The TiCon smeltery is an example of a Good Multiblock. There are not many Required blocks and the pattern for placing them is pretty simple. The optional Blocks all follow simple rules and are mostly intuitive.

Two other mods that make fairly good use of the Multiblock structure are Botania and Immersive Engineering

The particular reason I call these out, is because, like guiless blocks, it's very hard to do multiblocks well without a lot of documentation, and both of these mods have done very, very, good jobs of making the multiblock design clear. Botania's visualize mechanic, while not making immense amounts of sense, is completely wonderful, and if you can figure out how to do that for your own multiblocks, it will make things much nicer for your players. Immersice engineering is not quite as good at this, but still not bad. It is my personal opinion that IE relies a bit too much on multiblocks, but it's not enough so to really be a problem.

In terms of good functionality of multiblocks, the paradigm I would aspire to is Immersive Engineering's Grinding machine. The functionality makes sense, it looks incredibly sexy (one of the perks of using a multiblock,) and it's designed in such a way that, although you might have to check your book to figure it out, chances are it'll be fairly intuitive to you.

When adding new mobs, mods will occasionally make mistakes.

When I downloaded AoA, and loaded up a world, I was almost immidietly destroyed by a monster that did massive damage, and that my attacks did not damage. Upon respawning, it ran toward me and killed me again.
And again.

And again.

And again.
I couldn't walk a block after spawning without dying.
Easily the worst mod design I've ever run across. Talk about never mining.

So, what I'm saying here is, think a little about where your mobs fit into the game, and whether they make sense at all.
An immortal bear that kills anybody who makes the mistake of trying to play the game is a really bad idea.
If you're going to make a mob unkillable, just don't do it.
If you are using an entity for a trap or some mostly non-combat reason, then it makes sense.

The gist is, make sure that your mobs are on a level with the player, short of boss mobs that need to be specifically summoned, or chased to another dimension like the enderdragon.

There's not much more to say here, as a lot of the specifics of mob design differ from mod to mod, and there's not a clear right way to do it, beyond that you should try to make them not too similar to vanilla mobs.
For example, no pink zombies, but then the mutant zombie is cool.

This is one that an absolutely stunning number of mods fall into, and that's trying too hard to be just one thing.

For example, Mo Creatures adds, well, more creatures. But when one kills those creatures, they've gotta drop something, and that something is almost always worthless, or next to worthless. This is because Mo creatures is all about the creatures, and the drops are really secondary, which does not entirely lead to a great gameplay experience.

The mods that suffer from this the most, however, are biome mods like Biomes O Plenty and ExrabiomesXL.
Yes, they add more biomes. They make the world prettier. But almost every vanilla biome has some specfic reasons to visit it, and the ones that don't, mods can more than make up for. The vanilla biomes, short of some of the more recent biomes, when used with mods, pretty much any biome has specfic reasons why you'd want to be there, and why you'd make camp there, or search your map for one. Biome mods, particularly in larger modpacks, are just kinda of noise. They fill up the world with biomes that, yes, in many cases, look pretty, but which you really don't want to settle in because they're made up of useless blocks, and maybe have an ore or two below that make emeralds look like the most useful thing ever.

The basic point is, there is nothing wrong with being that tech mod that has magic wands, and in fact, in some cases, it will vastly improve gameplay to do that.

Minecraft is a game, and people download it to have fun. The same goes for mods. Therefor, ultimately, it's more important to work toward making sure the player enjoys themself than it is toward adding even more of what your mod already has.

While this does not make a huge amount of sense, a good portion of a good mod is the ability to not actually use that mod.

To slightly disambugate that, if you're playing a mod, and you like everything it adds, except for one thing, you want to turn that thing off, no?

Not everybody plays minecraft the same, and not everybody wants to. It's very useful to leave configs around for everything you can, so that people can make your mod be exactly what they desire.

Also, using comments, it's really easy to make a really easy to understand config. Don't leave it as something like:
ricecroptickonrain = 7
What does that even mean?

Nothing, including, however sad it may make me, anything else I have to say in this post, is as important as making the mod you want to play. Everything else I list here can improve your mod, in one way or another, but if there's something that you do one way, and I'd do another, do what you need to. Ultimately, it's really pretty hard to make a mod that follows everything I've put forth here, and none of it is without controvercy. Except the doccumentation section so far, but that could change. Do what you want to do and what you want to play. Chances are, you're not the only one who likes minecraft the way you do.

I disagree with the reasoning for this one. Those mods may be simple and there may be tons of them but making one is a great way to figure out the basics of modding. That said I agree that anyone making a mod like these should only be making it for experience not expecting people to play it.

You are right that most people probably haven't played through all that minecraft has or challenged themselves with what it does offer. However, the generic part of minecraft (overworld, zombies, skeletons) really are not much of a challenge and a lot of people are looking for minecraft to be harder in general not just in specific fights.

I agree with this one but with a strong suggestion that any new mods go for 1.9 as the minecraft code itself is cleaner the game will be less laggy than previous versions.

Personally I think fluids are fine but I agree that many mods don't make proper use of them. TiCon and IC2/GregTech are some of the only mods that I see that use fluids well.

No it is not. However, we cannot help you troubleshoot code that you do not understand and we are not here to do the work for you.

Multiblocks can add a lot of immersion to the game and if you have something that makes sense to be a multiblock by all means do so. What you should avoid though is many different kinds of blocks in specific patterns.

The TiCon smeltery is an example of a Good Multiblock. There are not many Required blocks and the pattern for placing them is pretty simple. The optional Blocks all follow simple rules and are mostly intuitive.