Several weeks ago I submitted a post with regards to the negotiations between FTB and Curse. These negotiations have now been concluded and last week a contract was finally signed. Along the way I took on board feedback and suggestions from members of the FTB team, mod developers and also the FTB community at large which helped to form the base of the final agreement. I am going start off with the basic details of how the deal has been structured and how it will affect the community over the coming months. I will say before I start that I would like to thank everyone that has taken part in these negotiations and in my opinion this agreement will be excellent for everyone and I am personally excited to begin work on this project. Whilst the project may take several months to start to come to fruition, I believe the end result will be of huge benefit to the entire community.





Curse Client (replacement for the FTB Launcher)



The first thing that I need to make totally clear here is to define the terminology. Up to now FTB has made what we call a launcher. This means that you install the mods and log into minecraft via our launcher. With the Curse client, the client will install mods, modpacks and resource packs in a similar way, but you will then be passed through to the Mojang launcher in order to log in and launch the game. This is being done in order to help improve the integrity of your Minecraft accounts by removing third party involvement.



The first part of our agreement with Curse will be at some point in the future we will move the FTB mod packs off our launcher and onto the Curse Client. The current timeline for this is approximately 6 months. However as a more accurate guideline we will be looking for feature parity with the current FTB Launcher. This means that the Curse Client will need to be able to offer similar functionality to what we have now. Further it has now been agreed that the new Curse Client that is currently in development will have no ads whatsoever. There may be some sponsorship at some point in the future for the client but at this time there is no plans for that either. There will also be no restrictions on bandwidth for the downloading of mods or modpacks at any point. (more on this a bit later)





FTB Forums



Although this hasn’t exactly been finalised, the current plan is to move the FTB website and forums over to a new domain. This is likely to be something along the lines of ftb.curseforge.com. This will be a new site heavily influenced by our current site, we do however hope to expand the site to include new features. At this time, there are no plans to put any adverts onto the new forums, they will however use new software that Curse has developed.



CurseForge and Curse.com



It has now been better clarified how Curse.com and CurseForge.com have been designed to work together. CurseForge is being set up to be the portal for content creators (mod developers etc). This is intended to be the site they will go to in order to upload and manage their mods, resource packs or maps and to add any other content they may wish to such as images, links to youtube spotlights etc.



Curse.com is being designed to be the main site for players to download and get information about their favorite mods, modpacks and resource packs. Curse.com will be equipped with a full set of search tools and other features which should benefit everyone.



Curse Premium



During our conversations, we have spoken a lot about how Curse Premium should work when it comes to Minecraft. It has always been important to me that basic functionality is not hidden behind a paywall. Nothing should ever be added that would only serve to segregate the community. This is something that everyone agrees on and we intend to follow the model of making premium features primarily cosmetic in nature. In other words we want you to use Curse Premium because its cool and not because you need it.



Other things



I currently plan to start a monthly competition on the FTB website, this will involve things like build and art competitons. We have negotiated a deal which means we will have prizes we can give out to the community on a regular basis.



Also on this line we hope to continue to host tournaments at Pax events in the future. We currently hope to have a competition at Pax East next month. This is currently set to take place on the Saturday Evening. There will be several prizes available for this (we will get a map out for this as soon as we can).



This is only a basic outline of everything so far and some of these areas are still subject to clarification. There is a lot of work to be done over the next few months in order to make everything happen. However, at the end it is my hope that we come out with a series of tools that will benefit the entire community.



In the near future I will be running a live stream where I will be joined by one of the members of the Curse team for a Q and A where you can ask questions and get more information from Curse’s point of view. I hope to have this happen within the next couple of weeks and I will post more details as soon as this is confirmed.