Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I would like to share a couple bits about how I tweaked my family’s private Minecraft modpack. Let’s get started!
If running a curated modpack were bad for finding help, a custom modpack is even worse. It’s the sort of thing you just don’t do when you don’t get –or keep– working unless you have someone who knows what he or she is doing, or has the patience to figure it out; you won’t know everything — nobody will. That is why why I cannot stress enough the importance of knowing where you can ask for help after you’ve made an effort.
It took me a few Discord servers, but I landed on one for modded Minecraft in general. Minecraft Forge, a popular modding platform, refuses to support anything they’ve made but the couple most recent Minecraft versions, 1.15 and 1.16, but the modding scene has of this writing has not yet moved on from Minecraft 1.12.2 for stability concerns in the base game. This Discord server I found is full of people from this scene. Some of them are even developers of popular mods.
My family’s custom modpack is fairly lightweight because we have a lower-power computer or two to consider. As such, once my sister, Tzarina8472, had all the gameplay elements she wanted, new mods were always carefully considered. One of our mods involved using a rare crafting ingredient from woodland mansions, and we wanted a renewable source of them.
I turned to an old favorite: Soul Shards: Respawn by TheNut (there have been several versions, each by another developer). The basic idea is that you go out, collect mob souls with a shard, then use the shard in a cage. My problem was that the default recipe for a shard was way too cheap. Our seed has four witch huts, and if we are just going to spam a few high tier sould shard cages, then why bother? I’ve done that and ended up losing interest in the world, and I don’t want that this time.
Taz and I went through the config files and rebalanced things for using some more expensive, modded metals from what I like to call the Thermal Expansion suite, while keeping to the general design principles that appeared to have gone into the original mod. We ended up using two alloys: enderium and lumium.
Trouble: the way the mod is coded, those two metals are “block states” of the same base block called thermalfoundation:storage_alloy. I spent hours across multiple days trying everything I could think of to properly configure the mod. Suffice it to say anything I tried either didn’t work at all, or accepted any storage_alloy, even the much cheaper steel.
Special shout out to Watersfall, a mod developer on that Discord server I found. He looked at the publicly available source code on GitHub for Soul Shards and found a bug where it doesn’t accept block states in the config file. He even created a fork with a patch and used a pull request to petition that it be merged back into the main branch. He even talked me through how to clone his branch — and how to make sure I had the correct base version.
Compilation was another matter. Since the patch was written for the Minecraft 1.12.2 version of the mod, I needed to compile it with Java 8, or some equivalent. I don’t remember who, but someone talked me through making a shell script to compile the new version using the proper versions.
The other, smaller story I want to tell started when we noticed we didn’t have a way to remove enchantments. Taz had an expensive drill or saw from Thermal Expansion, and needed a way to remove it. One mod called Futurecraft backports select items from newer game versions, but because we need to use an older version of Forge, we would have needed to use an older version of Futurecraft that didn’t have the grindstone, the block we were after.
We tried using a small, one-block mod to add a disenchanting table, but of all the things it let us disenchant, it refused to allow Taz to remove her one enchantment. Enchanting Plus looked like a good option, except for the fact that it also lets you selectively apply enchantments. Let’s just say I feel strongly against that feature, and Taz doesn’t see a problem and leave it at that. There were miscommunications, I balanced the config to make it free to remove enchantments, but prohibitively expensive to add them so as to not devalue our planned villager trading hall.
I also -could – not – stand- the default texture for the enhanced enchanting table Enchanting Plus adds. I find it to be way too busy, even though a close look shows that it’s the same 16×16 resolution as the rest of the game. Going by the crafting recipe, you’re adding an ender pearl and either some gold foiling or gold chains down the sides. I used Taz’s computer to unzip the .jar file for the mod and find its textures. Taz then used an editor to design replacement textures based more on the original artwork. I put the result in a resource pack, and I had to make sure it was the correct format version.
Final Question: I’ve had to prune several details that didn’t fit with the overall narrative. What are some details you’ve really wanted to include, but didn’t quite fit?