Often people wonder why mods don’t always get updated for newer versions of Minecraft. The simple answer is that it’s hard and time consuming. Minecraft’s underlying code gets rewritten a lot, and a mod’s code for one version often needs to be vastly different to code for another version.
If you’ve been keeping an eye on the releases for Bok’s Banging Butterflies, you will have noticed that the latest release for 1.21.4 was delayed by about a week. The reason for this is that the data generation code in Minecraft had undergone a significant rewrite since 1.21.1, and that meant having to relearn how to do certain things from scratch.
This highlights one of the greatest challenges any Minecraft modern can face: that it takes significantly more effort to maintain a mod across multiple versions of Minecraft.
In my last article I highlighted how I had to revert back to my Python scripts for some data generation as I ported to older versions. Every version changes something a little bit, and these small changes add up to a fair bit of extra work for a modder.
At the moment I maintain my mod for 6 different versions of Minecraft, and I’ve fallen behind. I want to create a release for the latest version of Minecraft, but the new method of releasing “drops” has only exacerbated the difficulty of keeping up, since they happen more often.
As a modder, you not only have to wait for a drop to release, you also have to wait for a stable release of NeoForge/Fabric that supports the latest version. This is one reason you’ll see a delay before mods are updated after a new drop.
At the moment I’m not planning to update my mod for future versions until it’s feature complete. As you can see from my GitHub repo, I still have a few things I plan to add to the mod. After this I’m going to start porting the whole thing to later versions of Minecraft.
So if you ever wondered why mods either take time to update, or just don’t get updated, know that it’s not because modders are lazy. Its because it takes a significant amount of time and effort to do something that is essentially for free. You can make some money through advertising, but it’s not a lot.
Of course, people can make money by releasing content for Bedrock edition on the marketplace, which is likely why you’ll see a lot more content released a lot faster. The downside for a user being, of course, it isn’t free.
So next time you really want a mod released for a different version of Minecraft, be kind and be patient. People like me do this out of passion, and we will make sure you can play our stuff eventually.
