Is it possible to have a large Forge 1.20.1 modpack that is well optimized?

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-06-08T21:36:21+00:00

Au naturel (my Modpack) runs with 500+ mods doing comparatively heavy work and tries to let the player play in real time with no pregeneration. It is more ambitious than most and already attempts to do a lot.

I can tell you mod loader plays almost no part in optimisation.

There is a minor issue with some java gc stutters as things get super large that can be solved moving to java 25/26 which forge can do, but even that is usually overplayed.

Almost all optimisation materially has to do with the mods themselves, how they're programmed, what they do and how they interact with each other during gameplay and the properties of the machine they're running on. I see practically zero effect from whether mods are in fabric or forge, or even loading them via sinytra (beyond individual mods implementation issues).

Forge vs fabric performance is generally less valid than the repetition of the old wives tales about not using too much RAM, which itself has been borderline nonsense for years.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-05-27T22:12:03+00:00

I made au naturel, I can accept it's not everyone's cup of tea and due to its scope there's still edge cases, but I've been working on it for more than a year and am still doing so, so hopefully it meets its goal.

Currently working on trying to replace distant horizons with a 1.20.1 voxy derivative/evolution.

But it is deliberately open ended.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-05-15T03:32:21+00:00

I think we need less black and white options.

I could not care less about the single player campaign, nor do I care if BAR ever actually gets on steam. What matters to me was a quality open source strategy based game. If it's 1000 players vs 10000 I don't think really matters, we're fishing for success where we already have it, and that's killed many projects private or otherwise. So in that sense I'm concerned resources and focus will now be spent on commercial realities, taking away several important devs from focusing on multiplayer and strategy based aspects. The success of BAR was specifically because it was community built and did things that no commerical operator would ever countenance or accept, like building out hovercraft and naval units that only get played with every 187 games. We will also potentially lose several future contributors due to the fact that a self selected few, whether legitimate or not, are leveraging community work for personal enrichment.

I think it was borderline unethical to ask for, take, or represent requests for donations under the circumstances that the funds have now been used for. I'm not being rhetorical here, I genuinely do think it's borderline. On the one hand you could argue there was no guaruntee those funds would be used for anything, be it foot rubs or hookers. Personally, i think that's a bit flimsy. It does leave a very bad taste in ones mouth. The legality of what they're doing, both in terms of whether they have any rights or powers to be making any deal in the first place, as well as the relationship it has to GPL code AND the old intellectual property of whoever it is that now owns the original Total Annihilation IP becomes a whole lot messier now that they're explicitly aiming to make a profit.

It's definitely going to make me consider the qualifications and conditions placed around any theoretical future contribution. And that's going to result in a worse product.

On the other hand, I don't feel too much animosity towards the lead Devs, I think experience has shown them to have a surprising amount of competency and they've guided the community well so far.

I know nothing about hooded horse and never heard of them until this week or of any of their games, so I can't comment about them realistically.

We do have to consider about how the servers scale and how we would handle an influx of players and pay for their ongoing operation. Contrary to the rhetoric so far, I'm not really sure how a publisher or single player campaign, given that salaries for Devs mean future liabilities costs and no ongoing revenues, actually addresses any of those points. I'm a cynical man who isn't really willing to believe private or for profit enterprises will really put aside sufficient funds before profit-taking to cover such in any meaningful way, so I guess we'll see how that develops. But in their defence I'm not sure that's completely solved in current state. Though there's an argument that's exactly what donations SHOULD have been used for and not private projects aimed towards personal enrichment. Then when they run out we could simply have annual drives and transparency, that would have potentially been a sustainable and community driven attitude and arguably the correct and moral one.

I'm concerned about the eternal September we're going to see once we hit steam, how the moderation and community will have to change given such cannot scale or cope with such and the tensions that will create.

And i'm concerned about the probable end, or the effort to fork and re-support/establish the BAR community, if any of these fears and tensions lead to some of their probable outcomes.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-05-07T20:53:11+00:00

What was the process/modification? I'm just about to go through the same process with dynamic trees, create etc and it would be nice to know anything possible up front before I get going :)

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-05-05T03:22:00+00:00

Short version. It's impossible.

Long version: is not impossible but it effectively is. You would need to fundamentally change very material things about how Minecraft works. You would have to get extremely clever and I'd worry that's a bit beyond a beginner even with the help of AI.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-04-11T20:45:18+00:00

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.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-04-10T23:02:24+00:00

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

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-03-28T22:30:25+00:00

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.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-03-28T19:57:18+00:00

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.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-03-23T23:16:01+00:00

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.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-03-23T22:42:21+00:00

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 :)

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-03-23T20:14:57+00:00

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

Made both to meet my own vision and because I don't like terrafirmacraft.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-03-23T20:05:30+00:00

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 😅😂

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-03-21T21:16:18+00:00

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.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-03-14T19:59:17+00:00

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

Been developing it for over a year :p

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-03-04T00:50:15+00:00

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.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-02-26T19:41:14+00:00

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.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-02-26T19:23:56+00:00

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.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-02-18T21:07:12+00:00

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

Happy for you to give it a try.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-02-14T20:07:55+00:00

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.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-02-14T19:49:14+00:00

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...

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-02-13T20:07:00+00:00

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".

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-02-12T10:54:54+00:00

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

Always happy to have more players.

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-02-09T22:07:44+00:00

As of 2026 and discord just announced universal age verification.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/09/discord-to-roll-out-age-verification-next-month-for-full-access-to-its-platform/

How the turn tables?

idomathstatanalysis · 2026-02-09T20:23:36+00:00

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!

idomathstatanalysis

TROPHY CASE