I’m taking a break from development this week as I am focused on other things. So instead I decided to recommend some mods I enjoy using in my personal mod pack.
Minecraft
The biggest selling video game of all time.
Butterflies, Moths and Bugs
This week I spent some time fixing a few bugs I’ve been noticing while testing the mod. Now our butterflies look better, animate better, and spawn better. These things may seem minor in comparison to adding cool new features, but as I’ve said before: details matter.
Minecraft Mods About Cats
I’m still in China and unable to continue work on my mod, so I’m going to talk about some mods I like involving cats instead. These are two very simple mods that don’t change too much. They’ll fit right in to any vanilla-style modpack.
Villager Names and Death Messages
It turns out that behind the Great Firewall modding is difficult. Gradle is unable to download dependencies since a lot of them are blocked by China. VPNs can help circumvent this, but they aren’t very reliable at the moment.
Improving Quality of Life
This week I add a lot of quality of life improvements to the mod, as well as a bug fix. There aren’t really any major new features, but the mod is now a little easier to use, and is now compatible with mods that add custom biomes to Minecraft.
200 Files and Nothing New
This week I merged a change consisting of over 200 files. It’s probably the largest change I’ve made since the project began, and yet it doesn’t actually introduce anything new. Instead, it fixes a mistake I made when I first created the mod.
Keeping Their Numbers Down
Butterflies have been taking over. There have been reports that thousands have been spawning, overwhelming servers and lagging out game worlds. So I have spent a large portion of this week working to reduce the butterfly population and ensure that Minecraft servers remain safe.
Syncing the Butterfly Data
After releasing version 3.0.0 of the mod, I got a bug report in very quickly. Butterflies were no longer spawning in server games. I hadn’t really been testing servers up to that point, but as it turns out that didn’t mean people weren’t using the mod on servers.
Let’s Bottle Caterpillars!
I’ve been focusing a lot on caterpillars these last few weeks, and a thought occurred to me. Wouldn’t it be cool to have bottles with caterpillars in as well.
Naturally Spawning Caterpillars
Originally the butterfly mod was supposed to be a simple mod that adds butterflies to the world. It’s growing a little beyond that, with the butterflies actually having a complete life cycle. Unfortunately it’s actually pretty rare that a player will stumble upon a caterpillar right now.