minecraft(go back home)

foreword

aka: me being sappy about block game for like three whole paragraphs

(⯆ skip to projects)

Let me level with you for a second: This game has changed my life. It is ultimately the main reason I got into programming (good) and started spending more and more time on my computer instead of going outside (bad), so I have it to thank for… basically my entire study path and career so far. I started playing in late 2011, shortly before version 1.1 was released, which means that I was actually quite late to the Minecraft party compared to a lot of my friends who started in the Beta or late Alpha days. I still remember spending hours on those awful cracked survival servers—setting up chest shops, building crusty oak wood houses on my little plot, trying my best to cheese the (poorly configured) jobs plugin to become the first billionaire on the server—before I had finally skipped out on enough school snacks to “buy premium” from my allowance in August 2012. It took almost another year after that, though, for my obsession with this game to really start hitting, when in May 2013, a group of German YouTubers started a massive SMP known as the Megaprojekt.

What set this project apart from most other Minecraft videos at the time was that they were playing a modpack1, which means that suddenly there were portal guns, there were computers and turtles, there were quarries and pipes and nukes and jetpacks and just lots of other cool stuff, I mean we even had Thaumcraft (enough said). Point being, to little 11-year-old me, this was special; I knew how to use MCPatcher to install Sphax PureBDCraft 128x2, or WinRAR to replace class files to get Obsidian Paxels or Mutant Mobs and stuff like that working (something something delete META-INF), I wasn’t a complete stranger to this world— but so far, that was all just cobbled together manually, and I could only play in singleplayer worlds with it, so seeing like a dozen of my biggest role models at the time all playing on a heavily modded server together, building these big factories with machines and autocrafting, hollowing out entire chunks of ores with their quarries, roleplaying with each other and trolling each other in ways that were at times excessive (#NeverForget Dner nuke), it kind of… changed the way I saw this game, and it quickly became a staple of my after-school life to get on the computer, boot up the pack myself and play for hours on end.

Now, I would love to spend an hour going into excruciating detail about all the attempts me and my (three or so) friends made at setting up a server with Hamachi, leaving it running overnight on our craptops3 and then ultimately giving up and joining MyFTB instead because there were more people to play with on there and everything was hosted for you and they had /tpa and a shop and all of that set up, but (a) that’s not why either of us are here and (b) if anybody tells you they remember everything about their life 15 years ago they are a dirty liar (either that or my memory is just awful), so for now let’s skip past the years of me joining random multiplayer servers I found through streamers4, and my PvP phase, and that constantly recurring phase of wanting to become the owner of a large Bukkit server for reasons now unknown to me beyond “it would be cool”—including that one time I unsuccessfully tried to write my own plugins for it because I heard all the big networks were doing that), to the point where I finally got into modding this game.

footnotes

  1. specifically, FTB Lite for old btw (god i feel old) ↩
  2. deep max lore: a lot of my online “brand” today indirectly stems from this texture pack, including ᛟ ← this rune and i think even the dark and yellow colour scheme, which is a little weird because i don’t even particularly like the look of that pack anymore nowadays ↩
  3. or in my case, because my laptop genuinely couldn’t deal with it, my mother’s 9-inch HP netbook which was so chock full with bloatware i am honestly surprised it didn’t spontaneously combust at the mere sight of javaw.exe ↩
  4. Shoutouts to Luca, Konsti, Manu, Multi, Alex, Mario, Kevin, and everyone else I have met over the years; regardless of whether we still talk or not, I will forever cherish the good times I had with you. ↩

tl;dr best 19,95€ i ever paid for a piece of software thank you hatsune miku now let’s talk about how this shit made me (/lh)

projects and mods

it’s stuff i made…!! (that’s worth mentioning)

2019: ftb quests importer curseforge.png

FTB Quests Importer is a mod for Minecraft 1.12.2 that lets pack developers transfer their existing Better Questing quest packs over to FTB Quests. It supports converting most of the standard task and reward types in Better Questing (including some from addons like RF tasks), and can even be used to migrate players’ quest progress to make switching for existing packs even easier. Do be warned though that this mod is quite rudimentary and adds no new task types of its own, which means that a lot of logic that cannot be represented equivalently across Better Questing and FTB Quests (like non-consuming fluid tasks, for example), will not be able to be converted regardless. Still, it’s the first mod I actually released on CurseForge, so it does deserve a mention here.

read the story Every terminally online kid knows about the yearly Minecraft bug. It’s a terrible disease that makes you want to grab your friends and people you know and set up a Minecraft server to play on together—oftentimes with lofty expectations about where the server’s gonna go—only for the whole thing to collapse after like two weeks. Well, sometime in early 2019, that bug had bitten my friend group again, and this time, the pack we’d play would be Enigmatica 2 Expert. Great pack btw, I even spent some time contributing fixes and new features to it, but there was one thing that bothered me about it: The questing mod. Better Questing was… not great. With all due respect to funwayguy, I just didn’t like using it (especially as a modpack developer), it would send like 500 MB of quest data on login to players, and I was also just a bit of an FTB shill at the time, so using my massive leverage(/s) as a contributor, I tried to convince Niller to move to FTB Quests…

…and failed. There was just way too much that would have to be ported over manually and a lot of features from BQ (like linked quests) didn’t even exist in FTBQ, so overall, pretty understandable ‘no’ tbh. So I did the logical next thing and accepted defeat kept trying to convince him. I joined the Discord of the main dev of the FTB suite at the time, LatvianModder.pngLatvianModder, and as it turns out, he’d already been working on a sort of crude converter mod, so I took that (with his permission), polished it up and added some stuff like player progression porting, and I released it under my name and it still kinda sucked (for reasons seen in the description above), but to my surprise, people actually started using it. Well, not us, we never actually ported E2E to FTB Quests, but I had made a thing, that other people could use. And it was this realisation that ended up becoming my main motivation to create more mods in the first place, which is why basically everything you’ll see on this page is an API or utility for others to build on top of. Plus while working on the FTB Quests Importer, I gradually became more active in Lat’s server, and playing on his public FTB Academy server, I noticed another project he was working on that looked pretty promising, called KubeJS. (subtle foreshadowing)

2020: interactio curseforge.png

Interactio is a mod for Minecraft 1.14–1.16 that lets you use datapacks and JSON recipes to add all kinds of different “in-world” crafting recipes to the game, i.e. recipes that require the player to interact with parts of the world (rather than screens) in some form.

This includes, as of the mod’s final release:

This mod was discontinued in late 2020 as I just… lost motivation to work on it (mostly due to the its poor code quality and really feeling the covid burnout at the time), but for newer versions of Minecraft, Snownee has picked up the torch and made a spiritual successor called Lychee, which deserves a shoutout alone for its insane customisability—it’s basically all I ever wanted Interactio to become and I’m lowkey jealous I didn’t make it(/lh).

read the story When datapacks first became a thing, I was still fresh off my E2E playthrough, and one thing a lot of mods in the 1.12 era did was in-world crafting recipes; EnderIO had you setting bedrock on fire, Actually Additions made you transform Canola Oil by throwing different Canola Seeds into them, and AE2 had Fluix Crystals made from combining a bunch of items in water, and Singularities you entangled by blowing them up, just to name a few. I really enjoy those kinds of recipes, they work really well within the context of Minecraft, and frankly feel way more unique, diegetic and engaging than opening some machine’s GUI and waiting 200 ticks for your thing to be done (they’re also way more fun to automate, at least imho, since they force you to engage with more of the game’s mechanics than just inventories), so my idea was pretty simple: what if I made a mod that let you make custom recipes like that, and made it work with datapacks so you could do… basically whatever you wanted in-world?

That’s how Interactio came to be. There’s honestly not much I can say about the mod itself, it does exactly what it says on the tin, but one thing I will point out is how much I loved seeing people get creative with it in their own packs; for example, Lightning Crafting became a pretty major part of Enigmatica 6 Expert’s progression, and the pack was specifically set up to facilitate automation of these crafts, which means something I honestly originally “intended” to be used sparingly for “late game” recipes (think about it, iirc the only way to reliably do lightning recipes in vanilla is with a Channeling Trident) became into a regular mechanic that worked super well in the pack’s setting.

2020–current: kubejs kubejs.svg curseforge.png modrinth.svg

KubeJS is a mod for made by LatvianModder.pngLatvianModder and myself which allows people to heavily customise their modpacks and servers using scripts written in JavaScript. Instead of reciting everything the mod does myself here, I highly recommend you visit the mod’s own website for more information, just click on the big Kube heh… up there to learn more!

Still from the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode 'City Of Walls and Secrets'

“There is no KubeJS for Minecraft 1.12.2”

(no story here yet i’m sorry i have been working on this page for so long i am TIRED)

2020–ca. early 2025: architectury

note: i am technically still on the project i just haven’t done anything for architectury for almost two years

Architectury is a set of tools for Minecraft mod developers that makes it easier to develop content for multiple different mod loaders at the same time. It consists of three major parts: (1) a Gradle plugin that can inject platform-specific code into a shared common source set at compile time; (2) a fork of Fabric’s Loom toolchain that can be used across Fabric, Forge and NeoForge projects alike; and finally (3) an API mod curseforge.png modrinth.svg that provides loader-agnostic code for commonly used hooks and systems in Minecraft and aims to “abstract away” the differences between the different mod loaders so developers (ideally) only need to write their mod’s logic once.

I am/was primarily involved in developing the API side of things, mostly because that’s where I felt at home and figuring out the little quirks of how Forge and Fabric did certain things and how to make them work together was (mostly) fun! My involvement with Architectury has slowed down a lot since we stopped using it in KubeJS for 1.21+ and my studies have picked up since as well, but I think it is by far the biggest project I have ever had the pleasure of being a part of, and it has enabled a lot of really prolific mods to become cross-platform over the years and I am still really proud of that.

(i simultaneously have a lot to say about this project and not much at all so no story here either SORRY)

other stuff i worked on