MineCraft – Let's Build Robotics with Shadow

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am documenting how I set up Minecraft. Let’s get started!

Here is my 2023 list for “installing” Minecraft while minimizing your data bleed to Microsoft. I listed it in the rough order each technique should be implemented, but no one relies on any of the others.

Linux

Switching to Linux or another open source operating system is easily simultaneously the biggest, most impactfull, and least convenient change you can do for your privacy in terms of digital privacy in general. On one of my attempts at reading Minecraft’s terms, I found data collection policies on both Windows and Mac, but nothing on anything else. Furthermore, shortly after I created my Xbox account on a Linux machine, I found a section on their privacy panel claiming they had no data on my stuff (take-that-as-you-will). To keep it short: Linux being open source gives users a mechanism for action when potentially unwanted programs are are identified.

Xbox Account Lockdown

As alluded to above, Microsoft accounts come with a “privacy panel.” My overall experience has me believing it’s engineered to discourage its own use while still satisfying relevant privacy laws so marketing can safely boast about offering this feature to more users than they are required to. They mention a hotline you can call somewhere, but it was never staffed when we called.

To make the most of the situation, log into your microsoft account and turn everything off that you can find. But leave on the two permissions about joining multiplayer and communicating with text (the permission is bundled with voice permissions) for a normal gameplay experience.

GraalVM

Minecraft needs Java to run. GraalVM is a high-performance implementation of Java. I’ve covered manual installation enough to perform it from memory: download, extract, point application at java. Optionally, it can be placed beside other system Java installations. And wherever you place it, be sure to make a note of which CPU architecture worked because I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had to re-install because I got the wrong one.

PolyMC

Minecraft is complex enough to need various inputs most end-users never see because a launcher manages things like login, version handling, Java, and more. The game itself doesn’t care how these variables are provided, so we are free to swap out the launcher. MultiMC has been my open source launcher of choice, but I spent several hours researching a couple alternatives and their history. PolyMC is a MultiMC fork that adds support for downloading mods. Prism Launcher is a PolyMC fork that split over the lead “ghttps://www.iizcat.com/uploads/2016/10/lcyay-cheshire-gif.gifoing crazy.”

From what I pieced together from various accounts, PolyMC was born out of a dispute over MultiMC’s direction in 2021 regarding third party mod loading. On October 16, 2022, lead developer lenny mclennington had had enough identity politics. The following day, he deleted the standardized Code of Conduct in a commit titled, “reclaim polymc from the leftoids.” Community backlash began immediately and grew worse as it became clear that Lenny wasn’t hacked: over a page of bogus issues on GitHub, around 3500 accounts raiding his Discord over the following week (judging by #joins traffic) with offensive Internet garbage, and LOUDLY denouncing PolyMC as compromised and accusing Lenny of injecting malware. The drama reached Microsoft, who canceled PolyMC logins for a couple days until that got sorted.

Around an hour after Lenny’s controversial commit, work began on what would become Prism Launcher. The ejected developers migrated over there where today they number at around 200 where PolyMC and MultiMC each list around 100 contributors each. Between the three, activity on Prism’s GitHub has been a lot more consistent (almost daily). Bad blood exists among the forks of MultiMC, but this gives end-users the chance to evaluate each project based on its community rules. MultiMC keeps its project simple, PolyMC prefers it not be used to push politics, and Prism Launcher is getting the updates. Pick your poison, or tell me all about why your preferred not on this list is the best.

No Chat Reports

Minecraft moderation was once handled by local communities. On one extreme, anarchy servers rules read, “Anything goes!” and players can grief without any retribution but what their victims muster. On another extreme are intricate codes of conduct dictated by mods-who-don’t-like-YOU: “Farms may only load 30 entities at a time, but no ‘selling’ entities if they stand on two legs. We don’t care if you murderize your rejects, but we absolutely won’t condone slavery – even if you call it an ‘adoption’ or ‘delivery’ fee! Oh, of course you should somehow be compensated for your disproportionally large time investment compared to everyone else’s marketable goods. We just don’t know how, Troublemakers.”

And then Mojang came up with Chat Reporting. Players can now tattle on each other to a centralized authority to get them banned from all multiplayer servers for a time (or indefinitely). The tech literate community revolted, creating tools like the No Chat Reports mod to strip actionable cryptographic authentication data from messages. Vanilla servers have a toggle to enforce this chat reporting though and vanilla clients will complain on login if this toggle is set to false.

own opt-out and Mojang provided a server side toggle to disable enforcing clients’ cooperation with this system. The No Chat Reports mod strips the actionable cryptographic proof your messages were sent by you. The vanilla server requires this proof by default and the vanilla client complains if a server doesn’t enforce it.

No Chat Reports can be installed via Forge or Fabric. Fabric is the better performing mod loader between the two, so I’ll be using that when I play “vanilla” from now on. It was a two click install for on MultiMC for the most recent Fabric version.

Takeaway

I know what I wrote last week about insisting on chat reporting both sides, but after learning how it works, I feel the need to retract that. While I could draw out my Minecraft migration story to detail how I go through these steps on each of my machines and the difficulties I encounter with Graal and PolyMC, I have more important projects I want to work on. I’ll only cover those if I learn something new.

Final Question

What did I miss? I would love to include your suggestions in a future guide.

I look forward hearing your answers in the comments below or on my Socials.

Works Cited

[1] u/RealLemonmaster, u/Chezzik, et all., “Any pros and cons to Prism launcher over MultiMC,” reddit.com, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthebeast/comments/10ak23a/comment/jmivti8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3. [Accessed July 17, 2023]. (Citation refers to multiple comments)

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?

Tag: MineCraft

Shadow_8472’s Minecraft Installation Guidelines (2023)