How are Mods Added to Minecraft

Long story short: most mods use a mod-loader to have themselves added into Minecraft.

The mod-loader does all the heavy lifting of "breaking into" the Minecraft code and connecting mods to the core Minecraft rules and functionality.

Mod-loaders need to be updated for every version of Minecraft that is released.

The most popular mod-loader is called Forge. It’s been around for a long time. One disadvantage of Forge is that it often requires mods to also be updated when Forge is updated for a new version of Minecraft.

This is one of the reasons that newer mod-loaders, such as Fabric have been created. One of Fabric’s goals is to do a better job of insulating mods from changes to Minecraft and the mod-loader.

Forge (for Windows) includes an installer that will modify the default Minecraft loader app and add a Forge version in the list of available Minecraft versions when you start Minecraft.

This is much simpler than it used to be! But it still requires you to find the correct directory into which mods need to be copied.

MultiMC

Enter MultiMC– an alternate Minecraft launcher.

It makes it very easy to create instances of Minecraft. An instance is a separate copy of Minecraft where you can control the exact version of Minecraft downloaded. It also lets you add (specific versions) of mod-loaders to instances with a simple button click. As well, it makes it as simple as dragging-and-dropping mod (jar) files to add mods and worlds.

You can also import and export entire instances (mod-loader, mods, world) to share them with friends.

It’s our favourite way of running and configuring Minecraft!