How is Modded Minecraft So Good?
I’ve played Minecraft for more than 10 years and it’s one of my favorite games of all time. It’s probably my most played game ever with who knows how many hundreds or thousands of hours of playtime.
Normal Minecraft is plenty fun, but the most fun I’ve had while playing Minecraft is when I play with mods.
I have a lot to say about this and there’s a bit of setup if you aren’t familiar with modded Minecraft so prepare yourself.
Mods and Modpacks
Mods are player-created modifications of the game. Mods can add utilities that streamline the game, or add new mechanics to play with. Many of the most popular mods focus on a specific theme (say for example, technology or magic) and add many new features for the player to mess around with. People have created electricity systems, magic mechanics, new monsters, animals, and environments to explore. The sky really is the limit.
Most of my experience with modded Minecraft is with the modpacks that people create.
Modpacks are a curated collection of mods that a player can use. This can mean simply collecting a bunch of mods for the player to mess around with together or highly customized and hand crafted experiences with some system of progression like a questline.
Mods and modpacks can create an experience that breathes new life into the game.
First Question: How can this exist???
To me, the mere existence of mods and modpacks seems so improbable, and yet they exist.
It’s really insane that modpacks can exist at all for a couple of reasons:
- The majority of these mods or modpacks are created for FREE by the community. None of these people had to create this content, and yet they did for the love of the game. Any given modpack has the combined work of an untold number of people brought together. If you have Minecraft Java edition, you can easily enjoy hundreds of hours of community created work. It’s actually quite inspiring to me and I hope that the things that I create will as beloved, enjoyed, and inspirational to people.
- The fact that all of these mods can interact together at all and not turn the game into a completely unplayable mess (ignoring bad performance) is incredible from a software standpoint. Lots of invisible work is done by people so that mod creators can have a common platform that they can build their mods on.
- Modpacks are also a very interesting design exercise. Most mods are originally made to be pretty standalone from each other. The fact that people can weave together different mods to make a unique experience is insane. So many voices and visions pulling the game in countless directions, and yet a singular seamless experience can be created. It’s like trying to take 5 other people’s essays and merging them together into one piece of writing.
- It’s also insane that people actually play these packs. Not all mods are insanely huge and add large amounts of new stuff, but having to play with “n” number of mods means generally knowing how n separate mods work and how they can interact with one another on top of having general Minecraft knowledge. The learning curve is often a vertical line because packs often assume you already either know how the mods work or know how to look up how the mods work and learn them. And yet, people (like me) enjoy them very much.
Second Question: How is it so good?
I noticed that I operate in these cycles of being excited to play a modpack for a couple of months, then forgetting about it for more months, and then getting excited to play a new modpack all over again. This doesn’t really happen with most other games I’ve played. I’ll pick up a game, enjoy it, and once I’ve had my fill I’m done with it. I always end up returning to Minecraft eventually, it’s almost inevitable.
Since 2021, I had the genius idea of just picking up where I left off instead of trying a new modpack and starting from the beginning. I am steadily working through “Enigmatica 2: Expert” which is a pretty popular pack. I play it whenever I feel like, take long breaks from it, and hopefully over time, I will complete it’s main questline.
I find it difficult to quantify just what it is about modded Minecraft that I like so much. How is this so good?
Here are some loosely connected thoughts of things I like about modded Minecraft:
Automation
One of the most common themes with mods and modpacks in Minecraft is “automation”: the ability to create structures that do processes that you would normally have to do manually. Things like wood harvesting, farming, and mining can all be done automatically with the utilities that mods provide.
These modpacks put Minecraft in league with automation / factory-building games like Factorio which are designed to be about automation.
It’s safe to say that it’s because of modded Minecraft that I even enjoy games like Factorio. Figuring out how to automate things is so satisfying to me because I love to work out problems, understand them, and solve them. Learning how these mechanics work and how to apply them is very satisfying.
I don’t understand what it is about modded Minecraft, but it has a way of drawing me in stronger than any other automation game in existence. The core gameplay of “collect resources, craft stuff, build things to automate collecting resources, repeat” is there, much like every other automation game I have played. What makes Minecraft different?
Immersion
Perhaps it’s because Minecraft is a 3D first person sandbox game which gives it a much more immersive quality than other games. Base building is feature that Minecraft already does very well and it’s fun to come up with some large structure to house all of your machines.
Everything you build has a much more “physical” quality to it because you can walk around and see things up close. You often end up crawling around in your factories, placing wires, and configuring machines.
Grew up with it
Maybe it’s because I’ve just played modpacks and Minecraft in general for a long time. I’ve grown up with the game and I feel strongly that playing modpacks and learning how they work over the years was very critical in making me who I am today. I have very fond memories of watching videos on YouTube like Direwolf20’s video series of various modpacks and mod showcases where he explains how mods work.
Redundancy
There’s a sort of feeling that playing Minecraft modpacks gives me that I adore so much. Because it’s a amalgam of so many ideas, there’s a lot of redundancy between mods.
Many tech-oriented mods will add many of the same new ingots (copper before it was added to normal Minecraft, tin, silver, lead). Mods will also add blocks that perform many of the same functions as other mods. Machines that pulverize ores into smaller parts to give you higher ingot yields are very common.
And so, you kind of get a feel for what mods you prefer to use for a specific task. Maybe this mod’s item pipes can be used to make things more compact, or this other mod’s pipes are faster or cheaper or easier to set up.
It’s almost like comparing different brands of items to use and finding your favorites. I’m not really saying that this is a better design choice, but it’s an experience that you don’t get with other games.
To a new player, that’s probably pretty overwhelming and weird, but to me it feels like there are so many different possibilities of how to do things and I have a good deal of freedom. If you don’t like how certain mods do things, then you can probably work around them.
One thing about all of this redundancy that I very funny is that the community loves synonyms. Like, you have the same idea: input ore, output ore dust, and you have so many machines with different but similar names: Pulverizes, SAG Mills, Macerators, Crushers.
If someone is remaking an old mod that isn’t supported anymore, sometimes they will give similar-but-different names to everything. It’s like a kind of inside joke.
Theming
The amalgam of many different ideas means that the theming of these mods are completely all over the place.
You’ll be using pumps and pipes to route blood around so that you can fuel your blood altar.
Your equipment will consist of many magical trinkets which all use different magic systems, each based on things like drawing power from blood, nature and plants, the stars, and the natural magical energy present in the world. Your tools will include pickaxes and drills and magic spells.
This mishmash of theming is something that I’ve grown to love so much.
I’m always thinking of things from an automation perspective, so different themes and mechanics provide interesting and novel processes that I need to automate.
Complexity
I could see some similarities in how people see modded Minecraft and something like Dwarf Fortress. The barrier of entry to playing a modpack is so high and the amount of tiny things or pieces of knowledge you need to begin to have fun probably discourage many from trying. I don’t even know how I stuck with it all these years and how I still enjoy it today.
When I play with these mods, I know intuitively how many of them work and how they interact with one another. I can seamlessly weave them together while building factories, much like how I imagine multilingual people can weave multiple languages together when speaking.
Perhaps it’s just a cozy and complex environment that I love to wrap myself up within.
One thing I do know is that I am glad that this is something that I enjoy.