Minecraft mods

MineColony is a truly lovely idea for a mod. It allows you to create ‘villagers’ who perform pre-determined tasks for you like cutting down trees or growing food. Create a few of them and you’ll get a functional automated economy, create a lot and you’ll be mayor of your own MineTown. This one is still in progress, with plans to add more professions in the future

Sometimes you just want to cheat, maybe because you’re building something epic, maybe you’re testing out one of the mods on this list, or maybe you’d just rather have fun than be challenged. For these people there is the Single Player Commands mod, which brings the admin powers from multiplayer Minecraft into solo games, for those who want to wield the power of a small, blocky god.

Another Yogbox mod; Millenaire did NPC villages before Notch added them to the main game, and still does them better today. Much like the latest beta releases, NPC villages are randomly generated around the map, and are populated by human mobs. The difference is that Millenaire’s NPCs are far more active, they chop trees, grow crops and make objects which they then trade with the player, making them feel much more like a real a part of the world.

One of the highlights of the Yogbox, Mo Creatures is impressive enough to warrant its own entry. It adds a simply astonishing amount of new creatures to the Minecraft world, making it feel like a living, breathing ecology. Crocodiles, Deer, Dolphins, Horses and even Werewolves are included, and the list of new creatures is being expanded all the time. If you want a world teeming with a vast variety of life, Mo’ Creatures is the mod fo’ yo’.

Not a solo mod, but a mod compilation. Yogbox, put together by the nice chaps at Yogcast, combines a variety of Minecraft mods, including some from this list, into one handy installer. It even includes its own version of the popular Painterly texture pack. It’s perfect for players who haven’t modded their game before and just want as much as possible in one simple, reliable install.

Adding a little bit of steampunk to technology to Minecraft, Pchan3 has created three mods under his SteamCraft banner. A steam powered boat lets you sail more reliably while a steampunk airship lets you fly through the air with the greatest of ease. If you want some competition for the skies you can also download the sky pirate mod, which creates pirate mobs piloting similar airships to yourself.

Ever get lonely in Minecraft? Well for those that do, there’s Humans+. Humans+ adds a whole bunch of new human mobs to the game, populating the world a bit more. That’s not all though, it also adds an alignment system, allowing you to gain and lose the trust of different kinds of factions.

Terraria is Minecraft’s big challenger in the realm of ‘Indie game build ‘em up’, both games have a lot in common but also have different strengths and weaknesses. But why choose between the two when you can have Minerraria? This mod adds a number of Terarria based features into Minecraft such as phase blades, corruption, fallen stars, hellstone and more.

There are a lot of mods that add weapons to Minecraft, but Balkon’s Weapons Mod is one of the best. The weapons all keep within the spirit of Minecraft while still being fun to use. The new melee weapons; spear, battleaxe, halberd, and warhammer all behave slightly differently, offering more variety than just swords, while the javelin offers an early ranged weapon without the need for feathers or string. The real highlight of the collection is the musket. Complicated to make and using a lot of tricky materials, but with incredible stopping power at the expense of reload time. You can even attach a knife to it to use as a handy bayonet.

Like MineColony, Humans+ and Millénaire, Builders adds human NPCs to the Minecraft world. However it attempts something far more ambitious than other similar mods; Builders’ NPCs actually build their own structures. There are a whole host of NPCs added who can build different structures from a list of editable blueprints. By far the most impressive is the Mayor; who can’t build himself but, if he gathers enough builders, can instruct them to construct an entire town complete with shops to trade with.

Currently Minecraft’s vegetation isn’t very interesting. Trees and plants simply stick around until the player chops them down, and new ones can only be generated by manually replanting saplings. Nature Overhaul completely changes all of this, Trees now drop saplings around them which automatically plant themselves and either grow or die if the ground can’t sustain them. The result is that forests, and other vegetation, grow and contract organically, mimicking a real ecosystem.

Finite Liquid really shows how a mod can evolve and change in scope over time. It started with a simple idea: to replace Minecraft’s unusual water physics with a more realistic system, but more and more features have been added. Now you can pump water, boil water, mine for oil and even construct a scuba outfit for undersea exploration.