(001) The cup that keeps on giving

👋 Hey everyone,

welcome to this week‘s issue of the Second Cup - your coffee break with everything new happening in and around the 1.12 Minecraft Modding Community.

This issue is a bit special as a few things didn’t go as expected, but that is something you probably can read about in the upcoming days on my personal blog.

Anyway, let’s get started for today - grab your mug. ☕️

🔎 Single Bean - Ender Safari

Yes even if the name suggests that this mod could be related to me, it is actually the newly released project by the people behind the Elite Modding Team - a collective of talented people around ACGaming.

Ender Safari itself started as a fork of EnderZoo, which is an addon to the tech mod EnderIO created by Crazypants. EnderZoo was responsible for spicing up the mobs the player encounters when playing with EnderIO. From the devious Khndrel Keght jump-scaring players when digging up dirt by hand to the mighty Dire Wolf - who may have been inspired by a certain YouTuber - which is a hostile version of the vanilla wolf which also hunts in packs, EnderZoo had them all. But then came something, which is a staple in the existence of our community - the developers behind a project left 1.12; either they continued their work on more modern versions or stopped caring about the game at all. After that, there tended to come a period where people continue to use said mods, find bugs in them, and report them. That way, a stale repository collected a bunch of issues that would never be addressed by their original devs. So forking and fixing up these old issues is something that happens on a regular basis, and the same happened with Ender Safari.

For now, it comes with the same additional mobs, items and blocks as the original, but it drops old dependencies, fixes countless bugs, improves modpack usage by extending config options, and they also plan to provide new original features in the future while adding back compatibility with other mods.

GitHub (source and issue tracker)

Curseforge (Download)

Tl;dr: There is no longer a reason to use EnderZoo on 1.12, and I highly suggest switching to Ender Safari or just giving it a try on its own as it no longer requires EnderIO as a dependency.

📝 Roaster's Notes: Meet @enderman.ender-development.org

Yep it sounds a bit silly to sit on both sides of the table for my little interview, but as this is the first issue, I wanted to give my two cents about the things going on in and around our little community. Furthermore, the deadline for this week’s issue was a bit short to get in contact with other creators, but be assured, I already have secured authors for the next 2 issues. 🥳

Why this old Minecraft version?

Alright, I’ll try to keep it short as this could be a whole blog entry of itself. But I actually got into Java programming through Minecraft as I picked up my first mod as a fork of a project the original author abandoned. That was the first time I learned to understand other peoples’ code. Before that I only made modpacks, where you mostly combine different mods, tweak some configs and maybe change some recipes or create some quests, but you always have to rely on the mods others made. You want this one special feature - too bad when it doesn’t exist.

The only way to get it was to make it yourself. That’s how I picked up my version of Embers, and a lot more followed.

What is your current passion project?

Right now, I’m quite short on time, so most of my projects are on hold. But once I finally have a bit more time to work on them, I wanna finish and release Catalyx, a library mod written in Kotlin which will be the base of quite a few mods we (I’ll get to the we in the next question) have in the makings. It is being developed in parallel so we don’t have to copy paste all base implementations from one mod to the next.

If you want some spoilers, feel free to check out:

the next major version of Alchemistry Redux

our from-the-ground rewrite of Emerging Technology

our spiritual successor to Ender Storage

Where else are you involved in the community?

Besides all my own projects and commissions, I teamed up with two of my friends to form our own little modding collective called @ender-development.org (No it wasn’t my decision to call it that.), where now most of my mod projects migrated to. Besides that, I’m also a somewhat active member in the 1.12 Coalition, a large discord community centered around our beloved game version, and help there with the community modpacks. Most recently, I picked up reviewing mods and modpacks on moddex.gg - an awesome site by the current Coalition leader @calamari.gold to help comparing all projects on CurseForge and Modrinth. Furthermore, it’s also a great tool to find the modpack for your next playthrough.

💬 Counter Talk

Alright what are the things discussed in various places? As of my current research, I only want to point out a few things for now; we might revisit them in a future article.

The 1.12 Coalition discussed initiating a modpack jam after the last mod jam back in December was a huge success with a prize pool of over 1000$, while also giving Modpack creators the chance to participate1 (though this idea is currently on hold, as the organizers behind it got caught in other projects for now)2.

The Cleanroom (fork of the original Forge mod loader) seems now to be launchable from non-MultiMC (including forks) instances3.

The 1.12 Master Doc originally also initiated by the Coalition just passed 300 covered mods, either by larger projects or continued by new forks.

🧽 Cleaning the tables

Alright folks, that's the brew for this week. Thanks for sipping along and see you next week. ☕️