Kids just got Minecraft and their friends are telling them to go all over the place and download this skin and that pack. I don’t want her to go out to a bunch of shady sites and download viruses to my computer.
Any help here?
Anyone?
I’ve used Planet Minecraft with no issues.
Cool. When she goes to that website does she just click on something and the skins will install or is it more complicated?
It has been a while since I played, but IIRC, for simple skins, it’s easy, but for mods, it’s somewhat complicated. in addition to planet minecraft, minecraftforum.net is a good resource.
It’s definitely a complicated process. I had to read various guides on how to make the mods work. Essentially you have to download some sort of modloader program, open the main app in some sort of reader program, copy the modloader program into the main app, and then you can install mods. Took me an hour or so to figure it out the first time, and every time I patch minecraft, it takes me another 10-15 minutes to remember how to do it.
Let them play un-modded to start with. If you have a spare PC, it’s not difficult to run your own Minecraft server. This is what I do for my nephew. Set it to whitelist mode - only pre-approved players may play.
It’s been a while since I’ve done it, but I remember it being very easy.
-
Enable see hidden folders.
-
Navigate to (your username)\appdata\roaming.minecraft (you can make this faster later on by unhiding the appdata folder.)
-
Backup any saves just in case.
-
Go into the bin folder in .minecraft
-
open minecraft.jar with winrar or 7zip
-
Delete the meta-inf file
-
drag and drop the mods files into the .jar
Note 1: Make sure the mod is compatible with your version of mine craft.
Note 2: Many mods require additional mods like modloader and forge to function, if they do they’ll say so in the information
Note 3: Some mods have special installation instructions, carefully read and follow them instead.
Note 4: Some mods are incompatible with one another, install mods one at a time and test them to avoid problems.
Note 5: Updates break most mods, if you have a lot of mods you’ll want to avoid updating until your mods have been updated.
Installing mods is tricky, but there are utilities to make it simple. The easiest is to use the just released mod-pack launcher at feed-the-beast.com, which automates everything. I think there are two mod-packs for it at the moment, but more are coming. A guy called “direwolf20” on Youtube has a nice intro video of it, and tons of videos of modded Minecraft.
Yep. Good advice here. One thing I’d add (or reinforce) is to make a copy of a clean minecraft.jar file. I’ve learned more about mods and skins than I ever thought I’d need to know…
Quoted for truth, 100% my experience.
It sucks that these mods are so complicated…complicated enough that it’s hard to trust some of these sites. My sons aged 10 and 7 are total Minecraft junkies and talk about getting mods all the time, only to be stymied by the process. When they asked me to help them, I spent a few minutes trying to help them then threw up my hands in disgust. Why are they so complicated to install?
Set aside a half hour to an hour alone with the computer. That is enough time to do anything you’d need, as long as you can follow the instructions. DON’T “help the kids with it.” At 10 and 7, they should do no installing or uninstalling of squat on your computer.
That said, it does NOT need to be so fucking complicated to install these mods, ESPECIALLY considering how the game is INTENDED to be mod-friendly!
It’s not actually intended to be mod-friendly…at least, not yet.
The game owner/designer was mod-friendly, but that is not the same as saying the code was designed to be easy to mod–rather, the code was designed to be legible to a guy who had no idea his little whim of a game would sell 8 million copies. All it means right now is that Mojang isn’t going to go all DMCA on modder’s asses.
A huge portion of the work that has gone into the 1.3 and 1.4 releases is all work to make the game more mod-friendly. Mod API is hopefully coming out with 1.5, once that happens, then you can say it’s intended to be mod-friendly.
Didn’t know that - I thought it was intended to be so from the beginning.
This, in conjunction with the rest of your post, made me giggle.
While that process looks correct, and while you nicely distilled what needs to happen, understand that such a process isn’t necessarily easy to casual computer users. As one tiny example, the first time I did it, I had to download 7zip and install it (I think I first tried winrar before running into enough pay screens to make me throw up my hands and start over–but I may be misremembering). Then when I tried to use it to open minecraft.jar, it opened the program fine, but wouldn’t let me copy over the necessary files; it took me several tries before I realized I couldn’t have minecraft running in the background while I did this, something that’d doubtless be bleedingly obvious to someone who’s more of a power user than me.
I stand by both your list of how to do it, and my claim that it’s fairly complex. On a scale of toast to spun sugar molten cake, it’s a brioche.
Yeah, I’m a pretty competent PC user and even I get overwhelmed with the minecraft mods sometimes. I have fucked up my install more times than I can count (which is why you always keep a backup). Life has become much, MUCH easier since I got MultiMC, which installs all the different kinds of mods for you.