[tossit444]

I think it's amazing to have a massive commercially successful game such as Minecraft give the fans the ability to be very liberal with what they can do with it. Now we have open-source re-implementaions that are pretty close to vanilla!

[somat]

Minecraft is wierd because all that amazing modding that is done is in spite of mojang not because of them.

I have not played minecraft in a few years but I think nothing has changed. Mojang, even pre microsoft, has never provided any sort of modding support. I grew up on quake where ID would give you the game code and tools necessary to make mods. Mojang gave nothing. modding on minecraft involved decompiling the bytecode, dealing with the terrible symbols the decompiler gave you then recompiling it back into a jar. It was ugly and unpleasant. later the bigger efforts produced some tooling and libraries to make this better, but mojang had no part in this.

So minecraft is wierd, one of the most modded game in existence, yet the developers have provided no mod support.

[charcircuit]

>never provided any sort of modding support

Bedrock added support for modding in 2016, 9 years ago, with resource packs and behavior packs. You can make custom entities, custom items, custom blocks, etc. There is also a marketplace available to distribute these to players, built right into the game.

Java edition also has had similar things for many years.

[xboxnolifes]

I don't know if it was done with modding in mind or not, but the transition to data packs was a non-trivial addition of mod support.

[imtringued]

The developers decided to not provide mod support because the modders have infinite freedom the way they are doing things right now. More freedom than if they gave you a modding toolkit like Bethesda does. It's the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft that's crippled with its official modding support.

[Its_Padar]

They do provide deobfuscation maps these days at least

[zimpenfish]

> Mojang, even pre microsoft, has never provided any sort of modding support.

I believe Mojang now provides deobfuscation mappings[0] which makes life slightly easier for modders.

[0] Although all I can find are people saying "we should move to Mojang's mappings!" rather than an official Mojang announcement.

[herbst]

That's where I got my update anxiety from. Everything was broken after every update, but we loved the updates still.

It wasn't easy and majong did not help back then.

[LelouBil]

> Minecraft is wierd because all that amazing modding that is done is in spite of mojang not because of them.

Umm no ?

They provide deobfuscation mappings, they keep features in the code that are not exposed to players while specifically mentioning modders (new dialog system, game tests API).

You also have a couple of Minecraft developers hanging out in modloaders discord servers.

While it's true that they really started embracing modding in like 2019 (when they started releasing deobfuscation mappings), they were never hostile to modding

[CalRobert]

MS is slowly killing off Java so they can push Bedrock (much less flexible) on everyone though. And all my daughter's friends use Bedrock :-\. I have a server with GeyserMC running to let them play together but it definitely isn't what it once was.

[terribleperson]

Bedrock might be more popular, but I think there is a large community with absolutely zero interest in ever moving away from Java. I will never go back to playing Minecraft without Distant Horizons after experiencing it, so Bedrock is absolutely not an option for me unless they added real LOD features natively.

[p0w3n3d]

During ramblings about new Minecraft jeb_ recently said that java is not going to be sunsetted, or at least that's what I understood.

Of course the course of Microsoft and jeb_ might be different and he might get pushed towards some decisions later. The problem is that kids nowadays don't use computers. They use phones and tablets. For me Minecraft experience on phone is awful but there are many young generations that consider it native way of playing games

[xboxnolifes]

By the time Mojang kills off Java, mod developers will have backported the entirety of modern Minecraft to 1.7.10.

[axus]

The impression I got was they actively promote Bedrock, but take the necessary steps to keep Java supported. They make more money from Bedrock, makes sense to budget there.

[squigz]

No they're not? Vanilla Java gets updates too, and even if they were, the modding scene is as vibrant as ever.

[dm319]

I find bedrock has much better performance than java. It runs very nicely using the MCPE launcher on linux.

[dusted]

I played the original a lot, and lots of modding, but I prefer Luanti these days. There are lots of great games in it, and many of them are very much Minecraft, others explore entirely different approaches which can be very interesting as well. I'm spending some hours playing with my 5 year old too, and it's great.

[charcircuit]

It was like that until 2012. Ever since then they've been tightening down further and further.

[hnthrowaway1956]

no, they don't allow it, they maybe begrudgingly tolerate it. They have a history of false-copyright striking youtube videos, and they've recently started using AI (Tracer AI) to DMCA-spray claims, some of which are obviously nonsensical.

Of course, they are fine with you making youtube videos about their game (itdraws people in) but try making a video about a bit darker topics related to the game and you can quickly find your video striked.

I even found an instance of a project like this one (a unfinished open-source MC clone which is vaguely similar but original assets and code and everything) receiving an LLM-written copyright claim based on "it looks similar and that's protected by our IP"