{"id":25061,"date":"2014-11-20T02:27:44","date_gmt":"2014-11-20T07:27:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25061"},"modified":"2014-11-20T02:27:44","modified_gmt":"2014-11-20T07:27:44","slug":"minecraft-modders-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25061","title":{"rendered":"Minecraft: Modder’s Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know for a fact that at least one Minecraft mod author reads this blog, and I’m willing to be there are others lurking. So I thought I’d use this space to offer some armchair game design advice. <\/p>\n

By nature this advice is going to be really subjective. If you disagree with it, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad modder. But I offer this viewpoint as someone who has spent thousands of hours in dozens of modpacks. I know my way around the world of Minecraft mods, and I’ve seen a lot of stuff that works and a lot of stuff that doesn’t. If you’re going to disregard this advice, make sure you’re doing so on purpose. Even if these details aren’t important to you, it’s probably important to some portion of your players.<\/p>\n

1. Don’t spam the World With New Resources<\/h3>\n

You know you’ve got too many mods installed when stone becomes a precious resource.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

There’s nothing more irritating than playing a modpack that has added an overabundance of some new resource. I start a new game and spawn right on top of a vein of Awesomeite. Then I find another. And another. It exists at all mining levels and my pockets are overflowing with it. Then finally I look on the wiki and see that I need just 4 units of it to make the new laser pistol, and it is otherwise useless. <\/p>\n

If your new resource is only used in one recipe, then maybe you don’t need to add a resource to the game. Consider using diamonds, gold, redstone, iron, or whatever else is of the proper rarity. And remember you can use blocks of 9 if you want to make something really expensive. <\/p>\n

If you really need to add something new to the world, make sure the supply is right. It’s better to have slightly too little than way too much. If your ore (or plant, dirt, etc) is so common that it becomes useless, then it’s unwelcome clutter. I should be excited when I see it, not irritated. <\/p>\n

2. Figure Out What Phase of the Game Your Mod Belongs In<\/h3>\n

Your mileage may vary.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Broadly speaking, Minecraft has three major overlapping phases: There’s the initial couple of days where you struggle to obtain food, build basic tools, and gather resources. Once you’re safe and you’ve got some form of protection, you usually begin building whatever strikes your fancy and working your way up the tech tree. Once you reach the top tech, you get to play around with the powerful toys and finish off your creations. A lot of mods vary the length of these phases, to extend or shorten the survival and endgame phases according to taste. But this same basic game structure holds on a vast majority of modpacks.<\/p>\n

There’s a temptation to make your mod “endgame”, because your mod is really cool and the player should have to work for it, right? Or maybe you want them to have the items in your mod right away? But for the sake of balance you should try to think of your mod in terms of what phase it belongs in.<\/p>\n

A good example is the Forestry mod from a year or two agoThe beekeeping mod has gone through a LOT of major revisions. The version I’m using now no longer works this way.<\/span>. It included a beekeeping mod. Beekeeping is fun. You check on your bees in the morning, collect their resources, shuffle them around a bit, and then you’re done with bees for the day and its time to go do something else. However, to get a bee hive you had to build a carpentry station. (A very complex machine.) You needed a ton of oil squeezed from seeds. (Thus cutting into the supply of precious seeds you have to use for growing food.) You also needed some engines and power and containers. All this, just so you could craft a box to put your bees in.<\/p>\n

The once-a-day gameplay is clearly ideal for the building phase of the game. Get up in the morning, check your bees, then get to work on your houseBy “House” I mean “whatever you’re building”. Castle, dungeon, fortress, city, etc.<\/span>. But the requirements clearly put beekeeping as an end-game activity. By the time you finally craft that first box, you’re long past the point of the game where you might care about the resources the bees have to offer. So now you check on your bees once a day and then… what? You’re probably done with all your major building projects.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of mods like this, with requirements that offer their gameplay too soon or too late to fit into the proper phase of play.<\/p>\n

3. Don’t Bury The Player in Recipe Busywork<\/h3>\n

THREE CUBIC METERS OF STONE.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Minecraft is a game where you can put three cubic meters of rubble on top of a pair of twigs and you’ll end up with a pickaxe. The crafting system was designed to be simple, intuitiveAside from needing to look up all the recipes in the wiki, which I STILL consider to be the game’s greatest shortcoming.<\/span>, and fun. Crafting realism<\/em> was never a priority. <\/p>\n

Recipes serve the purpose of limiting your access to items until you can gather the resources needed to craft them. You can’t get a compass until you dig deep enough to get redstone. You can’t get a diamond pickaxe until you find three diamonds. This raises the value of these resources and pushes the player to collect them.<\/p>\n

Not pictured: Use sticks to craft a wood gear, add stone to make a stone gear, and add tin to make a tin gear.<\/a><\/td><\/tr>
Not pictured: Use sticks to craft a wood gear, add stone to make a stone gear, and add tin to make a tin gear.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

In the Thermal Expansion mod there’s a device called the “pulverizer”. It’s a really useful device. But to craft it requires you to look up 8 recipes. The whole thing takes something like 15 distinct items or ingredients to build. That’s going to put a lot of inventory pressure on the player, probably sending them to multiple chests to load and unload supplies in between their alt-tab trips to the wiki. Maybe the author of Thermal Expansion loves wiki-reading and inventory juggling. And if that’s the case, then fine. But often I suspect that recipes are complex because inventing recipes is fun to do. The mod author is amusing themselves, while at the same time burdening the player with lots and lots of busywork.<\/p>\n

My suggestion: Avoid unnecessary intermediate parts.<\/strong> Don’t make me craft a spoke to make a wheel to make an engine to make a sewing machine. If the spoke and wheel have no other use aside from sewing machine parts, then just cull them and let me make the engine directly. And if the engine is only used in the sewing machine, then just let me craft the dang sewing machine directly. <\/p>\n

Again, some people like the busywork of recipe-wrangling, and just about any half-decent modpack will have a way to look them up without booting you out of the game for another wiki-run, but if you’re going to have complex recipes, make sure they exist for the right reason and make sure each step is meaningful to the player. <\/p>\n

4. Don’t Add Massive New Structures.<\/h3>\n

I know something has gone wrong when I spend more time on my smelter than on my house.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Many mods add large interactive structures. For example, you need to build a 33<\/sup> or 53<\/sup> pattern of blocks in order to make a single device with a single interface. I very rarely appreciate these, particularly if they’re aimed at the building phase of the game. Again, it comes down to busywork. If I need a machine to make aluminium siding for my house, then I probably want it available while I’m building my house<\/em>. Which means I need to build this structure before I build the house. But once the house is done I probably don’t want this giant piece of industrial infrastructure sitting in the dang yard. So now I have to tear down and move this huge thing. That’s not particularly fun.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t mind if I saw some point to it, but as far as I can tell mod authors do this kind of thing for the sake of “realism”. In vanilla Minecraft, you can build a one-meter furnace that can hold sixty-four cubic meters<\/em> of smashed stone. We are not here for realism, especially when that realism is just “tear down and rebuild things in a preset pattern”.<\/p>\n

Tinker’s Construct is a great mod, and I will admit the multi-tier furnace is pretty cool. Large machinery has its place. But if you’re going to make me build (and rebuild) something that specific, then consider doing what TC does and giving me some freedom in the layout and a way to switch out different functionality. <\/p>\n

And even allowing for how fun TC is, it’s not like the mod would be strangely incomplete if the furnace was a single block. <\/p>\n

6. I want New Light Fixtures.<\/h3>\n

Previously, I’ve built tunnels in excess of 7Km. That’s a LOT of torches. This one is only 250m and already uses over 180 torches.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Uh. This one isn’t advice. This is just feature-begging. I build a lot of crap underground. I hate building these vast underground systems and then hanging medieval-style torches on the walls. There are a lot of great mods that add new light fixtures, but they all use glowstone as a component. I can’t use those or I’d spend more time harvesting glowstone than I spend building. What I’d like is some kind of modest wall fixure that works exactly like a torch – and probably has a torch as its main ingredient – but looks like… I dunno. Anything else. A lamp. A naked lightbulb. A florescent light. A glowing orb. A glowing block. A rectangle. Something. Anything. <\/p>\n

I’ve been waiting for years for something like this to show up. I can’t believe it doesn’t exist yet. <\/p>\n

7. In conclusion.<\/h3>\n

It’s daytime and the skeleton isn’t on fire? MY IMMERSION IS RUINED!<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

In conclusion, you are awesome. Thanks so much for the tremendous work that has given us so much gameplay over so many years. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know for a fact that at least one Minecraft mod author reads this blog, and I’m willing to be there are others lurking. So I thought I’d use this space to offer some armchair game design advice. By nature this advice is going to be really subjective. If you disagree with it, that doesn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[211],"class_list":["post-25061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames","tag-minecraft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}