We all like Minecraft, but sometimes the game has those little, niggling annoyances that just won't go away. “Maybe, if they just changed one line of code somewhere, it would all be better.” Enter Mods, which can do everything from cleaning all the rotting flesh out of your fridge to letting you travel to the moon.

As a community, we have never thoroughly addressed the existence of Mods or come to an agreement on what kinds of Mods, if any, that we want in our game. Chibi would like to propose the following guidelines for the use and installation of mods on theparadox.us:

• Mods should be in the spirit of SMP. As per our player guidelines, we're a Survival server, and that means there's no free lunch. Mods which give you Totally Free Everything, or Awesome Cheese-tastic Powers that an epic-level D&D character would find unbalancing, are probably not in the spirit of SMP.
• We're all playing Minecraft here.
  • Any Mod which totally changes the look-and-feel of the game is probably not something we want.
  • The world will not be re-generated or reset in order to support a Mod.
• No Mod should be server-critical. We must be able to stop using a Mod and revert to vanilla Minecraft, at any point, without adverse effects on the world.
  • Mods may be abandoned by their creators; abandoned Mods will eventually stop working.
  • We will not elect to stop receiving updates from Mojang to support any Mod.
  • Mods that add new blocks are discouraged, particularly if they do not degrade gracefully to vanilla Minecraft. New blocks may be okay if they are obtainable only in small quantities.
• A Mod shall be discussed, vetted, and generally approved of by the community prior to installation.

Our benevolent creators have not yet delivered a stable API for mods, although this feature has spent some time in development. For now, mods remain the realm of reverse-engineered binary “hacks” on top of the original Minecraft .jars, usually with a Mod Framework to tie them all together. We have been considering adding a Mod framework, such as Minecraft Forge or Bukkit, to theparadox.us. Either of these frameworks would allow us to access a variety of community-contributed mods, with the following caveats:

• Frameworks rely on reverse-engineering. Since this takes time, a framework won't always have the latest and greatest Minecraft.
  • Minecraft 1.7.2 was released 25 Oct. 2013
  • CraftBukkit for 1.7.2 was released in beta on 18 Dec 2013, and builds continue to be labeled as “beta” even today.
  • Forge for 1.7.2 was released 26 Dec. 2013
  • Interim periods mean either doing without the framework or doing without the updates from Mojang.
• If we use Forge, everyone would have to install Forge. The process is much improved from their earlier days.
• Mods themselves have to be maintained. If their contributors abandon them, they will quickly pass into obsolescence.

With the above in mind, we've got the following questions for you, our players:

1. What is your position on Mods? Do you absolutely want them? Do you absolutely not want them?
2. Do you agree with the Mod Guidelines presented above? If not, please propose changes or revisions.
3. Creations such as the Team Center are the result of Command Blocks. Would you like to see more Command Block-based Mods on the server?
4. Do you want to use Forge? Bukkit? If so, what do you want us to do when Forge/Bukkit cannot be used with the current release of Minecraft?

Feel free to write your responses in the space below. Put each response in its own section, labeled with your alias.

While some of the Forge mods would be interesting, many would obviate several things we've already built, and I do concern myself with the server no longer working because a mod fell into Abandonware. Mods that add additional dimensions would be interesting, such as the moon, or linking books. I would be willing to endure some risk of lost effort there, as long as the world was not irrecoverable afterward. Some added recipe mods would be nice, such as the rotten-flesh-to-leather crafting ability. These further have the benefit that we would be unlikely to lose anything, should the mod be abandoned.

I am, however, in total favor of Bukkit mods, as they only require server-side (and ergo cannot cause a borked environment). I have seen a few by SethBling that were interesting–in particular, Bling Combat and a Grapnel Hook (not a hookshot, but an actual hook-and-line grapnel. In addition, I am interested in doing more command-block-based mods. Examples of this include Pokeballs (though I'm not sure how difficult it would be to expand this to SMP), and exploding arrows.

In particular, I am hesitant to suggest mods that require us to wait to install updates, especially as it is immediately after updates when I am most eager to play.