First of all, let me say that there’s still no news on the Vanessa front - need to wait until Monday for that.

As some of you may have seen on twitter yesterday, I announced my resignation from modding. Some may think that it is a stupid thing to do, based on a silly misunderstanding of the Minecraft EULA, right? (to clarify - I don’t blame Marc for his tweets/posts - customer support is what he does - and he was answering to the best of his knowledge - although he should have perhaps just left it to the lawyers :) )

Well, that isn’t the only issue at hand. The main issue, and the reason I’m leaving, is the treatment of modders - myself included - by the community which we spend hours of our time to provide entertainment for. For having the gall to voice my opinion, I have been attacked on numerous occasions - despite my actions.

For example, all the mods I have ever released have been Open Source, under the extremely permissive MIT license. And ComputerCraft (which isn’t my mod, but Dan’s, I was just wingman) has a permissive license which says you are free to use it in any mod pack. Nor have I ever put any malicious code into my mod, or any other mod.

But apparently, people who do not agree with the guys who believe just because we put our work into the public domain, that we have no rights, are “shitheads”, “POS”, “shit coders” purely because of a difference of belief. And this is not the first time this has happened to me, or others. The amount of abuse we have to put up with purely because we speak out, is astounding.

Now, as anyone who reads this blog knows, I am going through an extremely stressful situation with my daughter. Things aren’t even great at the moment - if you check my last post, you will see why. I also have not had the urge to code for 6 months now - and was only just starting to get back into it. For that reason, and having too much crap in my life already, I have decided to throw in the towel, rather than face flak in the modding community. I don’t need this. In the past few days I have had a breakdown - and it made me realize that something has got to give.

Coupled with the fact that I believe respect towards the modding scene - from Mojang and the community alike - is at an all time low, that something, sadly, was modding.

Will I be back? Maybe. Anything could happen. Don’t get me wrong - for every bad apple community wise, I know there are hundreds of more who see my point of view, and who believe we are to be respected - the amount of tweets of support I have got since I announced I was out was staggering. However the bad apples are often the most public and at the forefront of what we see.

Should I have a thicker skin? Perhaps. But honestly, I need to focus on my daughter, and my life - I can’t afford to let something that is barely fun anymore, make me feel worse than I already do.

Thank you to everyone who has given me your support. I am not retiring from the community - by all means. I will continue streaming, and tweeting, and taking part in ISP - and I am still available to anyone who needs help. But I will no longer be producing mods for Minecraft for the foreseeable future.

Thank you to all my friends in the modding community, and to modding itself. Modding has done great things for me, no doubt. If it wasn’t for modding, I wouldn’t have been able to get to the USA to see my daughter. If it wasn’t for modding, I wouldn’t have met great people. Thank you to you all.

On another note, I wonder what the Starbound Lua API is like nowadays…

So long, and thanks for all the fish!