Modding Epilogue:

I’ve been sitting on this post about Minecraft modding for a while. I’ve been trying to figure out how best to communicate it.

The tl:dr; version is that I need to be done with Minecraft modding.

This is a huge decision for me. I’ve struggled with it for months. I feel like I’m letting down everyone who plays with or used to play with my mods, and that I’ve said a lot of stuff that I can’t follow through on.

I started modding Minecraft because I enjoyed playing Minecraft.

I wanted to make cool stuff. I accidently got put in charge of AlchemyPlusPlus, and soon after ended up with Minechem and Particle Physics too.

With these mods available for me to play with, I was enthusiastic about playing Minecraft, about writing cool new stuff that I could play with ingame, about testing and bugfixing and dreaming up new features and mechanics that players would love…that I would love playing with.

That changed. The modding community can be incredibly toxic. I was fortunately almost never on the receiving end of the toxicity, but there is a pervasive lack of respect that never set right with me. I ended up avoiding interacting with most other modders, because I was afraid of appearing like I didn’t know what I was doing (plot twist: I still don’t know what I’m doing) or that I didn’t know how to write good Java code.

Somewhere along the line, I had a couple of encounters with LexManos. Some online, some in person. None of them were pleasant. As the curator of the Forge modding API, he sits in a very visible and very influential place in the community. His treatment of other modders is hurting the modding community. His attitude directly contributed to my decision to end my long term involvement in Minecraft Modding.

I’ve been on a downward spiral since 2014.

Ultimately though, Minecraft modding was just a part of my life. Since my grandfather died, I had been slowly shutting down. Shutting myself away from life, from interactions with people, and from things that used to make me happy. This, combined with several months of grueling 14+ hour work days, eventually lead to a health breakdown in October of 2015, and ever since I’ve been trying to get my life back together.

I’m working two jobs to pay for rapidly rising rent here in Portland and pay back debts from school, medical bills, and repairing my car after it was repeatedly vandalized in 2014.

When I do have free time, I normally spend it sleeping or playing something that sorta helps me unwind enough that I can relax and go to sleep. The result is I don’t have the energy to do modding. Combined with the uncertain state of post-Microsoft Minecraft modding and the community toxicity, I haven’t been able to do any serious modding in almost a year.

Official announcement.

So, I’m making it official. Over the next few weeks, as I can find time to squeeze it in, I’m going to move my mods to a Github organization, put all of my planning documents and config stuffs into a wiki, and open it up for other people to partially or completely take over my Minecraft mods. I’m still deeply invested in several of them, particularly AlchemyPlusPlus and Werkbench, but I’d rather someone else did something with them than let them keep collecting dust.

Categorised as: unfiled

Comments are disabled on this post