page_title: Minecraft mod
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Minecraft mod / History
caption_attribution_description: English: w:Jens Bergensten speaking at a modders panel at w:Minecon 2012
context_page_description: A Minecraft mod is an independent, user-made modification to the Mojang video game Minecraft. Thousands of these mods exist, and users can download them from the internet for free. Utilizing additional software, several mods are typically able to be used at the same time in order to enhance gameplay. The Minecraft modding community is one of the most active modding communities. Its mods are one of the main reasons behind Minecraft's overall success.
  Minecraft mods are available for computer and mobile versions of the game, but legacy console versions cannot be modded. Mods for the Bedrock version of the game made using Minecraft's own API are known as "add-ons".
context_section_description: Although the first version of Minecraft was released in May 2009, client-side modding of the game did not become popular in earnest until the game reached its alpha stage in June 2010. The only mods that were released during Minecraft's Indev and Infdev development stages were a few client-side mods which had minor changes to the game.
  With the release of Alpha, the first server-side mods began to appear. One of them was hMod, which added some simple but necessary tools to manage a server. Michael Stoyke, also known as Searge who would later go on to work for Mojang, created Minecraft Coder Pack (MCP), which was later renamed to Mod Coder Pack, keeping the same acronym. MCP was a tool which decompiled and deobfuscated Minecraft code. MCP would recompile and reobfuscate new and changed classes, which can be injected into the game. But, if multiple mods modified the same base code, it would conflict. To solve this problem, Risugami's Modloader was created; Modloader prevented any conflict occurring due to multiple mods modifying the same base classes or game resources.
  Towards the end of 2010, new mods were released which featured more content than previous ones. Minecraft was now preparing to move into its beta development phase, and popular mods such as IndustrialCraft, Railcraft and BuildCraft were first released. As opposed to their predecessors, these mods had the potential to change the entire game instead of simply tweaking minor aspects of it. Bukkit, a server-side mod intended to replace hMod was also released during this time. CraftBukkit, a server software which implemented the Bukkit API was also released. Bukkit allowed server owners to install plug-ins which modified the server's way of taking input and giving output to the player without players having to install client-side mods.
  Around November 2011, the Forge Mod Loader and Minecraft Forge were released. Forge allowed players to be able to run several mods simultaneously. Forge utilized MCP mappings. Forge also released a server version of  Forge, which allowed mods to be run on servers, which eventually led to people creating modded servers. Forge ended the necessity to manipulate the base source code, allowing separate mods to run together without requiring them to touch the base source code. Forge also included many libraries and hooks which made mod development easier.
  After Minecraft was fully released in November 2011, the game's modding community continued to grow. In February 2012, Mojang hired developers of the Bukkit to work on an official modding API, allowing mod developers easier access to the Minecraft game files. Bukkit was then maintained by the community. A fork of CraftBukkit, called Spigot which was backward compatible with plugins was also in development. An Alternative to forge named Liteloader was released. Liteloader made modding very simple and promoted adding new content instead of modifying existing content. Like forge, Liteloader also used MCP mappings.
  In 2013, Forge Mod Loader soon replaced Risugami's Modloader as Modloader wasn't being updated in time by its developers. In early 2014, a new server software named Sponge, which had a very powerful plugin API compared to Bukkit, and was also compatible with running Forge mods was released. Sponge also introduced mixins, an alternatively to modifying byte code. Soon, Liteloader implemented mixins into their API allowing developers to modify in-game content.
  In mid-2014, Spigot released a server software made to link many servers together. The project was called BungeeCord, and had a separate plugin API from spigot and spigot plugins could work side by side with BungeeCord. Many popular Minecraft servers use BungeeCord to link up Minecraft servers together. PaperMC also released a modified version of BungeeCord called Waterfall, which included optimizations that were not present in Spigot.
  Concern arose following Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang in late 2014. Members of the modding community feared that Minecraft's new American owners would put an end to Mojang's established prac
caption: In 2012, Mojang organized a panel on modding at MineCon 2012, where Minecraft's lead developer Jens Bergensten held a talk.
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