Mods and Minecraft ? A day in the life II

I?ve been playing Minecraft now since Beta Pre-release 1.8.1 and now we?re at Release 1.3.2, so it?s been a while.

I thought that I should write a little about Mods and how to install and run them in Minecraft, for friends who may not be on the forum where I do most of my writing about Minecraft.

Summary:
The finding and downloading of safe mods for Minecraft is somewhat fraught (but not too bad) and there aren?t great guides all the time or easily found that talk about installing and using them. Certainly I had to struggle a lot to find a good how-to and it presumed a lot of knowledge that I didn?t necessarily just have, so I think a guide with pictures is a good idea.

Sites I personally consider safe as Minecraft starting points:

• minecraft.net ? This is where you should download your actual standard minecraft game. And pay for it too! This is run by Mojang.
• Minecraft Forums ? This is where most of the pages about mods live. Run by Curse.com.
• Minecraft Wiki ? This is where you can get most standard information on Minecraft. As a Wiki it?s potentially more susceptible to hijacking by folks with suspicious intentions, but just be aware of it. Run by Curse.com.

Things to know:

• It?s almost all about minecraft.jar and specifically the exact minecraft.jar that the standard Minecraft client software is loading and running. See below for how to find that on your computer.
• Mods must be the same version as your Minecraft client. See discussion below for a screenshot of your client and where to look for the version number.
• When you allow the Minecraft client to update itself, it will overwrite your current version of the client?s minecraft.jar file with the newest version. This will wipe out any Mods you installed in the prior version (unless you made a backup) and make you do the installs all over again with the new, clean version it just downloaded. If you run multiple versions of Minecraft for different servers, it behooves you to make a backup of that clean version each time it?s downloaded (you have to explicitly allow this download, so you?ll know) and it also behooves you to back up the modded minecraft.jars you may make.
• Since you are modding your minecraft.jar file, you probably want to know where it lives. In OS X, it?s in your User home directory (Either /Users// or ~), then in the path, Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/bin. All put together, that?s ~/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/bin. In Windows, it?s at %appdata%\.minecraft\bin. Go there to find minecraft.jar, which is the jar file your standard Minecraft client is running. See this article in the Minecraft Wiki for more info.
• Some Minecraft multiplayer servers consider some or all mods cheating and will kick you off if they know you?re using them. I?ll leave it up to you to find out what the rules are on each server and to figure out what you are willing to disclose to folks who run servers. I think it?s highly contextual. I follow the rules in the vast majority of cases. In cases where I diverge, I make sure that it?s harmless. By which I mean that if I do ?cheat?, I determine to the fullest extent I can that it isn?t hurting anyone. Not some bullshit ?Oh it?ll be fine? decision that?s dismissive and not really a decision at all.
• Some mods require additional infrastructure, like ModLoader or Forge, which are sort of basic Mods required to help reduce conflicts between multiple other Mods. Yes, that?s right, some Mods conflict with each other. While mod manager software like Magic Launcher can help manage and load mods without the traditional install which involves cracking open the minecraft.jar file and deleting some files and adding others, that unfortunately doesn?t apply with ModLoader, which needs the open-heart-surgery method to work. So you may as well just buckle down and learn how to do it. More discussion on how to do it or how to find out how to do it below.
• It is absolutely important that you keep backups (ideally, not in the same folder as the original) of the pristine minecraft.jar and that you also backup the .jar file after a successful modding. But if you absolutely screw up and don?t have any backups, never fear. You can either delete all the minecraft.jars and then start the standard client and it?ll download and install a new clean version of your minecraft.jar file or you can completely uninstall minecraft (back up your save files first!) and then reinstall from a download from minecraft.net.

Obtaining mods:
You can find a pretty comprehensive list of mods on the Minecraft Wiki. Some of these even link to the official Mod downloading pages on the http://www.minecraftforum.net/ pages. I also sometimes go to Google, and usually type the name of the mod (if I know it) and append ?minecraft?. So for Rei?s Minimap, I Google: ?rei?s minimap minecraft?. In the results I look for the link that start with the domain name ?http://www.minecraftforum.net?. And I click it.

Clicking the link takes me to the post. Don?t worry if the post was published before the version you have was possibly authored or published. Mod post authors usually go back to the original post whenever they first wrote the mod for whatever version of Minecraft it was back then and edit it with new version numbers and information and updates when they update the patch. That?s so it?s easy to find it when your Minecraft client updates.

It?s pretty easy to find your Minecraft Client or minecraft.jar version number. If you have a recently-downloaded Client (like you just installed for the first time recently), and you are reading this post today on the day it was published, then your client version is likely 1.3.2. If on the other hand you are running multiple versions of the client depending on what server you?re connected to, then you either have to keep track of the versions yourself, set up a mod and version manager (will talk about that later) or swap out the versions by hand. You can always tell what version you?re currently running by looking at the lower left corner of the main screen (before you select Single Player or Multiplayer play):

This is probably as good a time as any for me to say that I host the clean (you do have to trust me, though) version of each version of the minecraft.jar that I downloaded. For those of you who are geeky or paranoid, the MD5 hashes for these files may be found at the bottom of this post. As Minecraft updates I try to keep this directory (and the hashes below) updated. Feel free to nudge me at malcolm.gin@gmail.com if you like. Anyway, the hosting location for those jar files:
http://www.malcolmgin.com/mc/bin/

Okay. So, you now know what version your minecraft.jar is running. Go to the Mod page you loaded and look for the mod version that goes with the version your minecraft.jar is. I?m running 1.3.2, so the version of Rei?s Minimap I want is the 1.3.2 version:

Let?s take a sideways leap and talk about AdFly for a minute. AdFly is a file hosting ?solution? that is one of those seriously annoying, extremely advertised-up sites that will likely stick around for a while because those misleading, spammy Ads that are plastered everywhere generate a lot of mistaken clicks, and it?s designed to. Also it generates a little revenue for the file uploader. Reminds me of when the World Wide Web was first starting out! Anyway, with AdFly, you do not want the automatic download. The automatic download is not the file you are looking for. What you want to do instead is wait the 5 seconds it takes for the ?Skip Ad? button to show up in the upper right?:

Click that Skip Ad button and sometimes, like today, that?s enough. The download starts immediately after you click it. Other times, you?ll go to an extremely spammy page with the link that you want in very small and unassuming letters somewhere in the middle-right of the page. (I?ll try to capture if it I see it.) Just note the sort of key words for your intended download and look for a link that looks like that. For Rei?s Minimap this time, the filename was ?[1.3.2]ReiMinimap_v3.2_05.zip?. You?ll probably need to click the link or right-click and choose save-as. Your link will likely not automatically download.

Now you have your Mod and you know where your standard minecraft.jar file lives. Awesome! For mods that don?t require Modloader, I recommend giving Magic Launcher a try. It allows you to set up profiles that you choose on launch that load different versions of your minecraft.jar (this is where you can use your or my backups) and also loads other mods on top of each other. Except in the case of Modloader and mods that require it, Magic Launcher keeps you from having to crack open the minecraft.jar file and muddle around in there. Another cool thing Magic Launcher does is that it tells you when a mod you want to load (when you set up the profile) is not compatible or requires ModLoader or whatever. I?m not really inclined right now to write another tutorial (on top of this one on Mods) on Magic Launcher, but drop me a line if you can?t figure it out.

Let?s talk a little bit about the minecraft.jar cracking open and how to do it. Again, if you run any mods that require ModLoader (take this link and then look for ModLoader 1.3.2 in the post), you?ll need to do this to install ModLoader in your minecraft.jar file. For Windows, most tutorials you find will probably give you enough detail, but they?re crap for Mac OS X. I know from experience. Yes, I run OS X (Lion). In all cases, the basics are:

1. Realize that minecraft.jar is just a Java-y zip file. So rename to minecraft.zip (after making a BACKUP!).
2. Extract all the files in the structured archive somewhere with built-in OS tools or utilities for working with zip files.
3. Delete some key files. (Go to the ?META-INF? subfolder and delete both ?MOJANG_*? files.)
4. Extract your mod?s files into the extracted version of your minecraft.jar you just made. (You have to be careful here because when you extract files you can often be one level too high or one level too low in the directory structure. Mods will almost certainly replace at least one *.class file in the standard structure, so if you don?t get prompted to replace files, you?re doing it wrong. Start again.)
5. Do something (different with each OS) to remake the modified files into a minecraft.jar again, usually by way of minecraft.zip.

If you screw this up somehow (it?s easy! I did it a lot when I was starting out ? usually by forgetting to delete those key files), Minecraft will usually refuse to load (and hang at a black screen). Delete your crappy work, go back to your backups and start again.

So remember how I said that the open-heart-surgery mod installation methods were different for different operating systems? The ?tutorials? are almost always written for Windows and they?re usually crap. The one on the Minecraft Wiki? Crap. These things are usually written by script kiddies with no experience in technical writing, so they don?t write down anything that?s obvious to them. While I support this in general for the sake of brevity, I also know that script kiddies are frustratingly good at having almost everything be obvious to them. In the profession of technical writing, on the other hand, it?s important to know what?s ignorable and what isn?t, and these kids have a lot to learn.

Speaking of good technical writing and support, the Mac Support 101 thread on the Minecraft Forums, however, is golden. In particular, they have a whole, useful OS X friendly section on modding (be sure to click the ?Show Spoiler? button to show the screenshots that have a particular gem of info on how to recompress your files into the minecraft.jar file properly).

In Windows-land, it?s a little easier to find tutorials, but there?s still a lot of noise out there from poorly-written ones. This one?s the best one I?ve found and it?s long and confusing (like this post! Yay!). But at least it helps by giving advice for dealing with crashes.

So there you have it, my friends. Feel free to ask questions about things that aren?t clear.

MD5 Hashes for the jar files in the folder I linked above:
MD5 (minecraft10rel.jar) = 3820d222b95d0b8c520d9596a756a6e6
MD5 (minecraft11rel.jar) = e92302d2acdba7c97e0d8df1e10d2006
MD5 (minecraft125rel.jar) = 8e8778078a175a33603a585257f28563
MD5 (minecraft131rel.jar) = 266ccbc9798afd2eadf3d6c01b4c562a
MD5 (minecraft132rel.jar) = 969699f13e5bbe7f12e40ac4f32b7d9a
MD5 (minecraft18.jar) = f8c5a2ccd3bc996792bbe436d8cc08bc
MD5 (minecraft19p4.jar) = cae41f3746d3c4c440b2d63a403770e7

Source: http://www.malcolmgin.com/blog/2012/09/02/mods-and-minecraft/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mods-and-minecraft

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