Projects

Background

During the Covid pandemic, with nothing better to do and thinking it would be a fun project, I decided to create a modpack for my friends and me to play. At that time, the Create mod was becoming increasingly popular due to its creative features and seamless integration with Minecraft. Create allows you to build almost anything, from Ferris wheels and trains to entire automated quarries and even mechanical computers. Inspired by these possibilities, I set out to design and create this modpack. Although my previous experience with modding was limited and unsuccessful, I was excited to give it another try.

The first iteration, named Create with some additions, was exactly what it described: the Create mod with about 79 other mods. The initial project ended in early April after we lost interest in Minecraft. It was fun, but not perfect and could have benefited from further iterations. So, later in September of that year, I tried again. After tinkering all summer, I created the next rendition: Create Combined. CC (Create Combined) was a significantly more complicated project from the start. It featured around 120 mods and included community-made addons for the main mod that extended its functionality, such as adding cannons, more alloys, and easier ways to make food. Typically, when building modpacks, you can usually just throw a bunch of mods in a folder, play it, and expect it to work well. But this project proved that mentality wrong. Throughout its lifetime, I did tons of QA testing (playing with friends ), bug fixing, and adapting the pack. The pack ended up with 56 different versions lasting from September 4th, 2022 - July 12th, 2023. Compared to the previous modpack with only 10 versions, it was a lot of work, but it did give me some valuable insights:

• I released so many versions that it was virtually unusable and unstable for anyone else running this on a server.
• Sticking with an idea was important. Over the project, I adapted to everything, which was too much and made the pack unstable and lack a creative direction.
• I never had a good way to communicate with the community. The only route I gave people was Curseforge comments, which no one uses.

Create Combined... Again?

• That's right, I was doing it all again, with two major differences:

  • Using Modrinth instead of Curseforge. Here's a brief TLDR on Modrinth: it's a new competitor to Curseforge, focused purely on Minecraft, mod creators, and most importantly, is more secure and faster.
  • Using Fabric instead of Forge. It was new, and I was curious what it could do and what new mods only supported it.

  So, with a clear vision in mind, I began creating my third modpack. As I built it, I created a Discord server where people could voice their opinions and concerns, which would eventually be worked into the pack update by update. Because this pack was primarily focused for others to enjoy, it boasted significantly more stability, with most updates being playtested on my server before they went public. That way, issues and balances could be addressed before the general public had to deal with them. As of writing this, Create Combined is still being updated regularly and going strong. It has also led to the releases of:

• Create Combined Mega The next main pack being created, built on Neoforge it's meant to leverage the other mods that are not available on Fabric, while removing some elements that Combined had (such as tempature and seasons) and adding features such as larger boats and horse carts. Among a multitude of many many other things.
• Create Combined Mini An extremely condensed version of Create Combined, meant to have the core mods and features and nothing more, In order to garner the most performance possible.
• Refracted A vanilla friendly pack that added new terrain, shaders, QoL features and more while still being vanilla server compatible and optimized.

If you have any questions about making modpacks or anything like that feel free to join the discord or email me. It's a great process to learn and actually helps you learn alot of great skills outside of just debugging java code :)