Lighthearted fun with Minecraft Coder Pack

Back in the day, the only way to mod Minecraft was to open up the jar in WinRAR, delete META-INF, and then drag all the modded files into the jar.

Of course, this method has been obsolete for nearly a decade after the introduction of Forge (and now Fabric), but that’s what I grew up doing. Looking at all those seemingly gibberish .class files while trying to install the Aether mod for the umpteenth time made me wonder how I could make my own Minecraft mod.

I never figured it out, until now! Kinda.

I was messing with RetroMCP the other night, and man oh man, if you ever find the need to mod Minecraft Infdev, you have found the right program. It functions the same as the usual Minecraft Coder Pack. It decompiles, deobfuscates, and allows you to playtest and output the standalone mod patch.

However, instead of being a bunch of batch files in a folder like the MCP of old, RetroMCP is an all-encompassing executable in both CLI and GUI flavors. In addition, it has been rewritten to work with nearly every Minecraft verison up to r1.5.2.

However, comma, I’m not nearly smart enough to do anything practical with it. Blame my shoddy programming skills unaided by the nondescript variables that MCP likes to throw everywhere. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun, though! I skiddied my way into a couple entertaining scenarios, which I will show you now.

Making items explode when they touch the ground.

A horrifying example of a negative feedback loop. May that cow rest in peace.

Spewing diamonds.

You are more than welcome to take a crack at these tools yourself. I’d love to see what you come up with.

(Before you ask, no. That skin wasn’t my choice. Shout out to Mojang.)

UPDATE 8/22: Here’s my ARG.