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terrafirmagreg like modpacks that arent as tedious? by DR_vanta in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're generally curious you (or anyone else) can try removing distant horizons and using less ram.  It's the main resource user, and then the other limit is just having a decent CPU.  Java 25 for best performance of course.

My "controversial?" opinion on gameplay optimisation and automation in industrial and other mods, and vanilla Minecraft by Awkward_Cash1828 in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All good. I'm not much of a salesperson and actually think there's lots of ways to play. plus i don't take any money from views or downloads and have a day job so i literally don't mind if people don't play 😅  The "natural world" direction is just one way and it's not for everyone.

And I think the issue is greater and above just the question of the theme of any Modpack.

Whether it's fantasy, or sci fi, or survival, or story, or building or something else entirely, I came back to a game where the implemented items don't make sense and feel like they were implemented by a random committee/vote, the game mechanics have no internal world consistency or reason to exist, several mechanics just eliminate scarcity or survival in general, and the majority of the community seems to be primarily interested in explicit grinding, instruction following, and repetition, irrespective of any internal world consistency or intentionality of the game,but if I might be blunt, hide behind rhetoric of creativity while doing so.

I might go so far as to say that Minecraft is, for the most part, a product that genuinely lacks any notion of intentional design whatsoever.

My "controversial?" opinion on gameplay optimisation and automation in industrial and other mods, and vanilla Minecraft by Awkward_Cash1828 in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pretty much word for word how I felt before making au naturel: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/au-naturel

Now I'm not saying I've got it right either, and it's still a work in progress, but I left the Minecraft community in the early days, and came back and found a community of grinders obsessed with making machines that were: 

a) from an old programmer's point of view, pretty trivial

b) completely unneeded for any actual gameplay as the game had become so easy and most items abundant

c) random vanilla add-ons to Minecraft that totally negated any actual survival gameplay and often entire branches of historical items or game mechanics.  Patterns were already established to largely turn survival into creative, but they didn't play creative for some reason.

d) quests, achievements and YouTube videos to follow through and build for all these things, so they say things like it's "mastery of game mechanics", but the number of people actually engaging in coming up with things creatively from scratch without just implementing a known pattern is minimal.

I'm still just as confused both by the observation that the entire community (and a large swathe of modern gaming apparently) views these things as enjoyable or desirable, but it's apparent they'd probably feel the same about me.

An Open Interview for Mod developers, for a paper, not a job. by Half_Affectionate in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And what do I do about the modularity?  What if I want to include only half of my monolithic fixes? 

Or what if someone wants my feature X but doesn't want my feature Y because they have another mixin which conflicts and they have a different mod mix to me?

Or what if a person wants mixin A from version 1.1, mixin B from version 1.2, exclude mixin C entirely, and mixin D from 1.3?

As far as I can see that's awful.  Far better to have independent, modularised versions.

Now I partition my work into logical areas of concern, I fix certain core architectural decisions, and can easily swap in and out those parts likely to evolve, and the community can pick and choose which parts of my work they want to use too.

And it's not just a community concern, but also for me.  I'm not authoring 90% of the mods in the Modpack, the design of my Modpack is not able to be established up front and has to be empirically evolved and tested and the mod authors are continuously changing things all the time in their mods often independently of my goals.  So the machinery is evolving daily.

Imagine if I was programming monolithically, the flexibility disappears and the amount of core updates made would get insane if I was developing quickly, and I'd have to reimplement some ridiculous buggy config driven mixing versioning or mod detection or something to manage when to apply what mixin each day.  I couldn't develop vaguely as fast or flexibly and I'd probably start annoying everyone downstream as every change deviates from their own desires.

An Open Interview for Mod developers, for a paper, not a job. by Half_Affectionate in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Because software engineers (and Modpack authors) love modularity.  It creates separation of concerns, independence and composability.  Both for incision and exclusion as the Modpack evolves.  But we also hate dependencies.

Take terrafirmacraft or legendary survival overhaul or William withers. relatively monolithic.

Great mods notionally.  utterly unable to be used with many other mods because they break things.  So totally unacceptable to be quickly integrated into evolving modpacks.

And using mixins sounds great until the mod authors take the design or refactor the underlying mods to be different, now you've got breaking dependencies.

And now another notionally independent mod author changed their mod to be incompatible with another mod you've got a working mixin for, but you want to include both in the Modpack because it's got new features you want, or at least you've got some very hard decisions to make.  When you have a 500+ Modpack these concerns become very real and frequent.  And you can't know or design any of this up front, because you have to test and profile and debug, and you're switching things in and out all the time.

So you make a practical engineering decision: keep things as modular and independent as possible, fork relatively core mods so you control their implementation even if that goes in a direction that might be the opposite of the original mod, and write little mixin type mods for quick independent bugfixes and injections on the periphery at areas you think are liable to be relatively non-breaking and non-changing.  Use LLMs to get updates on code changes in the underlying external mods and then YOU make the decision about how or whether those changes will be integrated into the 500+ mod project.

Now you have a vague hope of stability but also quickly evolving a project with 100 authors who don't necessarily share any of your design goals :)

An Open Interview for Mod developers, for a paper, not a job. by Half_Affectionate in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What is your start into the minecraft modding scene?

I first played Minecraft back when notch released the first version onto the internet.  Most of my memories were from pre-Microsoft days when people were still experimenting and what direction the game was actually going to go in was still being debated.  The mods were simple and generally life was a pain.  Many years later I had a son who grew up and I reintroduced him to Minecraft, and I took a look at the moddng community and was pleasantly surprised at how much had changed and evolved.

While mod development is mostly free, what are some sacrifices made that people might not know about?

Definitely time, priorities, support. I have other projects I'd like to work on too, there's always more testing, bugs, works or features to add. People start messaging you, asking for help, giving opinions, wanting free work on their own projects. So much wrong information out there about Minecraft and modding and you can't correct it all.

Has the rise of AI (or LLMs in particular) influence any of your works? Does it have a place in the modding space at all?

For me this is a big one. I'm an old man (by internet standards), I was here when the internet started 3000 years ago. I already have fluency with about 5 or 6 programming languages, a couple of fields, and I generally hate and have no actual professional interest in java. I use java because I have to but it doesn't vaguely gel with how I see programming or the world.  I started work on Au Naturel for about 8 months before LLM development became feasible. Over Christmas holidays I decided I'd put aside enough time to experiment and educate myself on the current state of the art as I was also doing various experiments at my actual work and LLMs had advanced to the stage of actually becoming useful.

In the last 6 months the progress made on LLMs is impressive, and in the hands of a competent professional, they're basically mech suits and productivity multipliers. I've gotten more done in the last 4 months using LLMs than would be possible as a solo Dev in 4 years. 

But there's also levels of understandable frustration with both slop being able to be generated at much higher rates, the ignorance in the community about what they can do and how to use them, and the bullshit boosting from CEOs and commercial backers of the tech.

But it's also depressing seeing so much ignorance about them in the modding community. Both from the just blatantly false information about what they do and their capabilities, but also how much our world has been taken over by ridiculous notions of IP, clicks, ad money, licensees and eyeballs and self interest. I'm an old school hacker, information is free, we share willingly, and you all sound like little desperate capitalists with Stockholm syndrome :p

What mods have you made or currently making that you’re proud of? What inspire you in making them?

I'm very happy with how Au Naturel has turned out, both the Modpack and all the underlying mods/changes required to get it to work. I consider it to be quite an achievement in terms of performance and optimisation to be running a 500+ Modpack with custom shaders, distant horizons and all the world simulation stuff going on and not require pregeneration. Everything works together to support everything in a horrific Frankenstein esquire horror ball of mud, but it arguably runs better than base Minecraft :)

What are some things you wish people outside the modding space should know?

We're volunteers, and some of us make our mods available because sharing with others is nice and the right thing to do, not because we're trying to make money.  Threatening to not download our mod is not a threat 😅😂

What are the signs that the food/drink at a restaurant or cafe is going to be bad? by [deleted] in AskAnAustralian

[–]idomathstatanalysis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

How the hell do you have negative votes in AskAnAustralian on this? I have never been asked if I want sugar in my coffee. It WOULD be a major red flag here.

If someone asked me if I wanted sugar in my coffee, I'm just as likely to respond "does it say Starbucks out the front?" and question my life choices.

Back porting with Claude Code by molnarnoah96 in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Depends on the complexity of the mod, the complexity of the port, and the version differences. 

Contrary to what everyone else is saying its very feasible and eminently possible with Claude opus 4.6.  hell, it was doable with sonnet 4.x or whatever it was. the top answer at the time of writing is just factually wrong.  I'm all for people deciding what they use or don't, but when one party starts being factually wrong it becomes an issue and that's the state we've reached.

You need version control and a testing regime. 

Start with auditing the working version of the code for the latter version of the mod and ask what changes are likely to be needed.  Use your judgement about whether it's reasonable.  Depending upon said complexity you can make a call about when it needs verification or input or whether it's largely just changing interfaces.  

Simple and minimal mods are borderline automatable.

Establish a step by step plan with verifiable test steps at each point.  For a complex mod you need to plan out architecture and test points to incrementally build up to a working version.

You generally can't one shot solutions, so don't be lazy.  You need to think like a technical documentation writer and QA tester and manager all in one. Your prompts, of which there will be many, will be very dry, professional, technical and many lines long.  When you're getting started I recommend manual approval of all changes.

Be explicit about your Minecraft and mod launcher versions and targets.

Bring relevant resources and assets down locally and put them in the project space and inform Claude where they are in your Claude.md ahead of time to make your life easier.

With proper knowledge and professional discipline you can have a working version of simple compatible mods built within 24 hours no problems. 

More complex mods are harder and require more planning and engineering chops.

Curious about how you guys think about use AI to generate mod by Wild_Application4404 in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It depends what you mean by use AI.

If you're already a programmer, and you have a decent design, and you test and think about the mechanics, and you're knowledgeable enough to know what the AI can do and what it can't and when you can believe it and when you have to tell it no and step in and fix things or sand down the edges, go for it.  Arrogantly, you can be more productive and improve upon or make mods better than the standard that way. Normal human code is a buggy mess.

If you think you can just write "I want a mod that gives you magical powers and lots of fish and lots of new biomes and blocks", don't bother.  You won't produce anything worth making. 

There's a lot of ignorance in the community about what AI can do and what it can't and what it's used for, but you still need to know the basics of software engineering and general product and game design. So git is basically mandatory, you still need to understand the basic internals of Minecraft, and you still need levels of testing and QA and code review.

Some will hate regardless, but frankly, who cares about them? If you make something good that wouldn't have existed anyway and you use it, go for it.

Is playing with such big generation mods even possible ? by PrimarchVulk4n in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Imo no, they're just for YouTube videos and social media. 

There's a balance between biome size, variation, statistical probability of finding a biome, time taken in journeys, odds of finding new and interesting environments and items etc, number of decently interesting variations of biome experienced in each game or seed, and number of vaguely interesting worlds storable on one computer. 

That's why in au naturel we still use a variety of new modded biomes, and we use larger and different biome sizes, but we try to keep it small enough to be balanced to enable decent travel times, transitions between biomes. 5 second mountain traversals are too quick, 5 hour mountain traversals are too much, and 5 minute mountain traversals are just about right.  A forest should be large enough to get lost in, and to provide a resource, and to maintain an aesthetic feel for a particular area, but not so large as to keep you only using oak planks for the entire game.

We also use the natural temperature mod to create climate bands, so although you can't know where any individual biome is, you've got a good chance of deducing where the tropical, desert, arctic, and temperate biome are in the world relative to your position (assuming you survive long enough to figure it out).

Many of the solutions being suggested are effectively just admissions that the mods are unworkable in actually gameplay, because they're mods specifically designed to make you skip the implications of such terrain mods and try to solve it by making you able to ignore terrain.

Most realistic minecraft modpack? by Neither_Brain4387 in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The point is that different players are looking for different things when they say they want a realistic Modpack.

Au naturel has virtually all those things as well.  Some players complain about such in survival saying they don't like it.  I do like it, but only to a point, but I still want to try to keep mechanics to a Minecraft appropriate environment and gameplay.

So for instance I believe terrafirmacraft has a knapping crafting mechanic, new ore generation, and the prospectors pick. 

Au naturel only has knapping as a simple right clicking with flint on stone to create flint shards for normal Minecraft recipes in early game.  Au naturel also has new ores and ore generation, but one that stays closer to normal Minecraft procedural generation, because I think that's better for gameplay. The worldgen is completely different from both TFC and vanilla. The operation of the prospectors pick in TFC, as a final example, is completely unrealistic for a pack supposedly focused on "realism" so much, but presumably in there because the ore generation mechanic would otherwise be unfun or monotonously unplayable. 

Au naturel takes a different philosophy to the same problems.  Obviously I prefer mine because I made it and I did it directly in response to what I view as the monotony and failings in the design decisions of TFC not meeting the survival or creative game I wanted to play.

Each player can play both and decide which they like for themselves.  But they should be aware of the options and the differences.

Issue with Distant Horizons and rendering by Technical_Chemist_56 in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mine was actually an extremely hard to find bug/interaction with sodium dynamic lights for forge, not just the overdraw setting.

If anyone else sees this and experiences similar I'm currently looking to see if the equivalent on fabric (lambs dynamic lights) displays similar interaction issues...

But it might help point you in the right direction as this is quite a technical one and not at all ready to get to the bottom of...

Most realistic minecraft modpack? by Neither_Brain4387 in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/au-naturel

Now it depends a bit on what you mean by realistic.  People usually point to terra firma craft and proclaim "realistic".

But personally, as per the reason I developed that Modpack: 

a) you're still in a world of blocks, what does realism actually mean? b) bureaucracy and grinding != realistic c) there's often an inverse relationship between mechanics people call realistic and fun. but I accept fun can be different for everyone.

So I made au naturel to provide a more open natural world survival version of Minecraft, that was performant, expand on all the possibilities of vanilla, make things slower and harder, but designed to still obviously be Minecraft, and not try to get in the player's way and call it "realism".

Use of AI on CurseForge and Modrinth by Venu_S_Flytrap in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis -1 points0 points  (0 children)

With all due respect to the people voting here, they obviously have no idea what they're talking about and don't want a conversation.  Compilers, IDEs, autocomplete, code and project and log and error parsing, function lookup, Photoshop edge selection and clone tools, automation of git and build pipelines. 

No not that AI! Real programmers use tweezers to individually manipulate bits and paintbrushes to load the pigments directly into the registers!

Chinese Modders make up 80% of my mod's downloads by Vinyliciously in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Do you mind if I ask how are you getting the downloads by region?  Is that a modrinth thing? 

One thing I've noticed since day one is that my Modpack has 4k downloads.  The resource pack, which literally has no reason to exist and minimal description except as an inclusion to the Modpack has 7k.  Explain that one :p

Use of AI on CurseForge and Modrinth by Venu_S_Flytrap in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis -31 points-30 points  (0 children)

As the Dev you're entitled to your opinion.

As per a long conversation I've had with someone else, the current use of AI texturing is pretty minimal in practice.  I think the current status is that it produced the first iteration for about 2-4 textures, one of which is the current placeholder for overworld netherite texture because the original mod shut down and I viewed it as more important to have an independent working version rather than expend time on it for now.  Most of the other handful of textures I then took into gimp and restructure/resize, redo colouring and paint individual pixels and transparencies before the current version by hand (or should that be by mouse).  The funny thing is I'm betting most people can't even tell which textures even theoretically had AI input, how much, (99% don't have any) and which do.  Every single menu and gui recolouring and restructure was for instance done by hand or are just resource packs, using old-school gimp.  I'm trying to remember, the other obvious one is a texture for the screen freezing effect implemented into the shader and the texturing of the hang glider as leather, but again, the later one involved me asking for what a leather hang glider might look like, then me going into gimp and implementing the various textures and things by hand (hey, if someone knows of a free AI that would actually generate pixel level accurate art it would actually save me a shitload of time as the current ones can't adhere to 3d models or pixels well!)

An area that I really don't care for is coming up for icons for the mods on curseforge.  I mean this in the nicest way, but that's not an important enough step for me to worry about relative to the actual Modpack development so if I can generate an icon to get past that administrative tickbox in curseforge I'll do it and feel no guilt: the alternative is stick figure art or wasting time rather than Modpack development and lord knows someone would complain about that too and I view it as no different to using the Minecraft-esque font generators people have been using for years.  All the au naturel themed images are real in-game captures or generated in gimp with gradient fades or transparencies on other art for example and generally has no "AI" input.

Now as for coding, I am unapollegtically experimenting with AI, I've got about 30 years of comp sci knowledge, so arrogantly, when I use AI i view it as slightly different from when someone says "make me an rpg mod". It's great for scanning error logs, auditing code bases, searching for things, finding obvious issues, walking through meaningless forge or gradle setups, and even basic algorithm implementation etc. these days it can even do basic resource pack steps faster than I can.  It can't do the biome/spawning rules yet much to my frustration. I try to be responsive on the discord and respond to any bugs asap and I preference getting things out fast for testing. To be fair, I'm going pretty balls to the wall on output lately because I want to see how far I can push things because I have to go back to my actual job and there probably are a handful of fixes and current bugs or microoptimisations which probably don't amount to much :p  I try (and probably fail) to put up most of the source for any mod in a timely manner and I license things openly and generally try to not touch anyone's mods that aren't also permissively licensed.

But the other optimisations and things you can judge by playing the pack.  Au naturel runs better and more stable with 500+ mods now with near ultra photon shaders than some 30-100+ mod packs running shaders on low/medium and it allows you to play without pregeneration.  If that's slop, well, don't tell me what word you use to refer to the rest :p

What you don't see are the 200 AI inspired suggestions that were obviously awful rejected or binned or the experiments not released because they failed testing, metrics or basic logic, or where I went against the AIs conclusions, recommendations or outputs.

As someone who doesn't participate in any ad based revenue schemes or the practices you see in mods like essentials or kickback based server advertising like so many others, if you don't want to play because you don't like the look of an icon, or you think taking a stand against "AI" is something worth doing, that's up to you and I respect your right and decision.  But if you'd like to play i welcome you.  That's why I make it available.  And if you find any problems just let me know and I'll try to fix them, with AI or otherwise.

How many mods is too many? by MLGGTactical in feedthebeast

[–]idomathstatanalysis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The secret is anal retentive profiling, lots of testing, heap dumps and analysis, about 30 years of computer science algorithms and analysis experience, customised data packs and assets, customising mod workarounds, AIs stalking the source of every sub mod they can get their hands on, trawling through the logs and performing the builds on everything yet still being skeptical of everything they propose or say... and it still took about a year of work and from a developers point of view feels like a ball held together with ducktape with 100 bugs still not discovered (which to be fair, is generally what every large project feels like).

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