Minecraft Mods Question
 

My five-year-old is into Minecraft. I've never really played it. He has now heard tell of a thing they call "Mods." And he, of course, wants to download some mods and then he will never want for material possessions again. (Or, as he put it, he will be happy until he is ten years old.)

In particular, he has seen a mod called buildcraft that he really wants (and, from what I have seen, looks pretty cool).

Before I start downloading mods for him, I want to make sure that they are not going to be more trouble than they are worth. I do not want to download mods that will make the game buggy and/or actually start making other parts of the computer buggy. And, considering his age, I also want to avoid anything that might, say, re-skin the TNT into "Big Fucking Boom Block" or other such things.

So, as is often the case, I come to the FOFC braintrust. Are there mods that you can recommend as fun and stable and not-inappropriate for kids? In particular, does the buildcraft mod meet that description?

Thanks in advance.

+1

I get hounded about this Pixelmon mod and tbh I couldn't even figure out how to install it. I'm fairly good with computers but all you get is half directions and nerd speak about various utilities and I'm not willing to piece together like 20 different tutorials just to load something up.

Welcome to Hell! :lol:

I like the mod that makes all the PCs nude.


Mmmm 8-bit sexiness!

I installed a shaders mod for my 11-yr old and it does look pretty good. It's the only one that I've done, but you're right to worry about it screwing up something. His shaders mod needs a mid-range computer to run really good, so while basic minecraft is pretty basic it ramps up pretty quick.

I had a youtube video for help setting up the mod, and that worked pretty good. Didn't run into any problems with it.

Finketr posted a couple weeks ago about this place, which is supposed to be an easier and safer way to install minecraft mods. I haven't tried it, but it may be worth looking into to see exactly what modpacks are available there. Several may include BuildCraft if its been updated to Minecraft's latest version, as I think its one of the more popular mods.

ATLauncher - Home

There are multiple launchers for installing mods, such as MagicLauncher, as well as the one Thomkal mentioned.

As for mods, suggest that you try resource packs which basically just "reskin" all the MC blocks - makes the game very different looking depending on which you choose and feels "moddy" without changing too much.

Its no big deal, there really arent any mainstream mods that are not suitable for a 5 year old.

The biggest issue we had is that the base game changed very often but not regularly. Sometimes 2 weeks between updates and sometimes 2+ months. The mods would then need to be tested, built, tested, updated but by the time that's all done a new version of the base game would come out.
It gets worse if you are trying to run a server...

I would recommend the modpacks, we had a lot of fun with MindCrack

Good Luck!

A launcher is your best bet - then you can easily turn off mods that are suddenly not compatible after an upgrade or something. I've never run into issues with any mods, and they certainly do add to the already awesome experience :)

My son wanted a few mods. I don't know if was my Mac or what, but they never did respond very well on it. I just ended up downloading the Xbox 360 version and he's pretty happy with that one.