Today I decided to take a look at some Minecraft mods. The whole modding scene is a bit of a mess and there is no easy standardized way to install them. You basically open up the minecraft.jar file and dump files into it. And compatibility between mods can be a big problem. Hopefully Mojang addresses this or when the community is able get their hands on the game source/mod API that they come up with some kind of simple mod standard.
Anyway, a couple of the things I checked out were very cool. The first set here I'm probably going to play with for a while here. Its a series of mods made by a dude named
Xie. That link goes to the Hunger mod, but Ill explain the others. The Hunger mod simply makes you hungry. Theres a little indicator that shows you how hungry you are and eventually you'll start starving to death unless you eat. I was looking for something like this to make the game a little more interesting when in Passive mode, but even in other difficulties once you build even the simplest house there is no reason to venture outside. Now you need to actively find food.
He has a couple other mods that kind of go along with that, which are Farming, Cooking, and Food Stacking. The stacking one just lets you stack foods into stacks of 16 which makes carrying them around easier (now that you can starve). Cooking adds more recipes to the game as well as campfires and stoves to cook on. Farming adds a whole bunch of new plants and seeds to the game. Trees can drop fruit, you can grow pumpkins, corn, and a bunch of other stuff. Pretty cool.
Another mod Im running now is
Nature Overhaul. In it trees will grow, die, and replant themselves. Forests will grow and spread depending on biome so you have everchanging forests without you having to go out and plant trees yourself. Another nice perk is in this mod using an axe on a tree cuts down the whole tree at once, saving you tons of time harvesting.
This last mod is really cool, but sadly slows the game down too much to keep it.
FiniteLiquid makes water behave more like water. Ocean blocks are still infinite, but digging out a "river" will cause the whole thing to fill in to the level of the ocean. Pools of water can be drained, and draining into another pool causes that pool to become deeper. Water on flat ground will spread until very thin and then evaporate. Its really cool to watch and its too bad it makes the game chug a bit because I would love to keep this one on.
