Minecraft has mods. Lots, and lots of mods.
Even before its full release in 2011, when it was still in its Beta stage, Minecraft had a modding community. Since then, the popularity of modifying the game snowballed. To this date, there are hundreds or even thousands of Minecraft mods - way too many to count or put into a complete list.
An official modding API was being discussed in 2010, but has been postponed several times and to this day has still not been released.note The community didn't want to wait that long and created some of its own APIs.
Editing Note: Italicize the name of every mod, modding platform, and mod pack. If the work already has its own page, please move the examples to that work's page rather than leave it on this one.
Modding platforms with their own pages:
Mod packs with their own pages:
Standalone mods with their own pages:
- Advent of Ascension
- The Aether
- Better Than Wolves
- Mo' Creatures
- Millenaire
- OreSpawn
- Thaumcraft
- The Twilight Forest
Minecraft mods in general
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: A lot of mods have one of these in them.
- Boring, but Practical: "Ore Doubling", a feature of many tech mods, is somewhat boring, but it makes the resources you mine go much farther by effectively doubling the amount of ingots you get per ore block.
- Some mods take this idea up to eleven, however—or at least up to five. The Mekanism mod, for example, has a rather complicated and somewhat expensive ore processing setup that can quintuple each ore.
- Gameplay Automation: A common feature of mods is the ability to automate certain tasks through various machines, such as smelting ores, mining, inventory management, or farming.
Minecraft mod pack tropes
- Bragging Rights Award: Progression-focused packs usually have a creative-only item or items available in survival, but with extremely expensive crafting recipes - getting to the point where you can make them proves you don't need them. Enigmatica 2 Expert even calls these items Bragging Rights.
- Disc-One Nuke: Some quest modpacks can lead to this if they have randomized quest rewards. If you get lucky, you can get a powerful weapon, a machine that is leagues ahead of what you can make at the time, or other things way before you should be able to make them normally.
- Nerf: Many "Expert" Mod Packs nerf various aspects of the game to make the game more difficult, such as giving you less planks from a single wood block, or altering crafting recipies so they take more resources. This is to encourage the player to use more complicated machines and automation to get around this.
- Rule of Fun: Attack of The B-Team is a mod pack from the Technic Platform that was designed not to be balanced or difficult, but really fun to play. The player becomes very overpowered very quickly, and all you need to do to fly is kill a single bat.
Standalone Minecraft mod tropes
- Blood Magic: The aptly named Blood Magic mod is themed around using your own life essence or that of other mobs to power various magical rituals.
- Big Book Of Everything: Many mods, such as Immersive Engineering, Thaumcraft, Botania, and Astral Sorcery, add an in-game book that teaches you various aspects of the mod. The Alkahesive Tome mod further goes with this by allowing you to insert books into it in order to access all of them from a single inventory slot.
- Boring, but Practical: Various early game ores from tech mods like Industrialcraft and Project Red. They are everywhere, but they can make great tiers of tools.
- Cute Monster Girl: Grimoire of Gaia is filled to the brim with these.
- Evolving Weapon: Tinker's Construct tools, especially if the Tinker Tools Leveling addon is installed, making weapons level up and gain more modifier slots with use.
- Formulaic Magic: The Psi mod is all about this, being where you can make your own spells using its own mini programming language.
- Gelatinous Trampoline: Tinker's Construct adds blue 'Congealed Slime' blocks in small slime islands in the sky. Congealed slime is a generic bouncy block that can make you bounce to a great height, provided that you fall from a great height.note
- You can also make these into boots to make the player always bounce if they land on the ground from a high enough place.
- The blocks can also be crafted out of blue balls of slime that can be eaten. They have a subtitle in the tooltip saying "It smells terrible, but if you have nothing else to eat..."
- Guide Dang It!: Most mods have either extremely complex crafting recipes or hard-to-build structures. Or both.
- NEI by chickenbones and JEI by mezz are very helpful when you're playing mods that add in many recipes, like Industrialcraft, Thermal Expansion, Buildcraft, and various other tech mods. Lessened greatly if the modpack has quests to walk the player through a mod, or the mod itself has a method of in-game documentation.
- Heart Container: In Tinker's Construct you will collect 'hearts' as you progress, which are a set of items craftable into 'Heart Canisters' which can be used to permanently increase your health. You can take them off and return to having a normal health bar at any time. This is not present in more recent versions, however.
- The Carrot Edition of Spice of Life will periodically give the player additional heart containers after various thresholds of eating enough unique food types.
- Incredible Shrinking Man: The Gulliver Mod allows the player to craft potions that shrink you down to as small as an 8th of your normal size and vice versa. The Chiseled Me mod takes this up to eleven by allowing you to shrink to nearly microscopic levels.
- Power-Up Food: Some mods, like Pam's Harvestcraft, add more foods to be eaten by the player. Sometimes in modpacks other features, such as Diminishing Returns for eating enough of the same food, a nutrition system, or adding heart containers for eating enough unique food types are added to give the player more incentive to make more complex foods.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: Immersive Engineering allows the player to craft a Revolver. Unfortunately it can fall into Awesome, but Impractical territory since the ammo is more expensive to craft than arrows, and the gun needs to be manually re-loaded after it is out of shots.
- Star Power: Astral Sorcery is all about this, using the power of the constellations to the player's benefit.
- Trapped in Another World: The Midnight mod has scenarios that can lead to this by adding a mob known as the Rifter, which spawns at night and can potentially drag you into the epomyous dimension.
- Unwinnable by Design: If you use Galacticraft make sure you check the config file first. The default option is to make the player respawn on the planet/dimesion that you died on. If you don't change this, chances are that you will die on The Moon and respawn on The Moon. When you respawn there, you won't have your oxygen gear with you and might die continuously if you can't find it again.
- This is quite common. Several let's players who play modded Minecraft have fallen victim to dying on The Moon - sometimes without even having a successful landing - and then being trapped there forever. Or at least until another player bails them out.
