Colore: My First Minecraft Mod


I’ve been working on this since I started my YouTube channel, and only now has it finally been officially launched. The Colore Mod, my first Minecraft mod. It really is a fairly simple mod, but it has taught me a lot about how the Minecraft code works, and given me some good practice in Java. I have a lot of ideas for things that could be added in the next update, including slabs, stairs, fences, doors, bows, shields, and transparent-colored blocks and panes, so this initial release is only the beginning.

This mod actually started out as a very basic idea, however. I was originally only making the mod to learn the very core basics of Minecraft modding, and so “SuperGeniusZeb’s Colored Blocks Mod”, as I called it, would only add 16 colored blocks, 16 essences, the 6 ores, and the 6 unrefined essences. The 16 colors would have been the same ones used across Minecraft’s colored blocks like stained glass, stained clay, and wool: red, orange, yellow, lime, green, cyan, light blue, blue, purple, magenta, pink, white, light gray, gray, black, and brown. Having accomplished this, though, I became unsatisfied with the limited range of colors, and decided to not base my mod’s color palette off of the standard vanilla Minecraft multi-color blocks. Instead I decided to go with a total of 14 colors: red, reddish orange, orange, orangish yellow, yellow, yellowish green, green, cyan (greenish blue), blue, indigo (bluish purple), purple, magenta (purplish red or reddish purple), brown, and grayscale (which represented white, black, and the shades in between). I decided that each of the base colors would have 5 shades: normal, light, lighter, dark, and darker, and this made there a total of 70 different colors. I chose 5 shades because I thought 3 shades would miss out on some useful variations of colors, and because 7 or more shades would be too difficult to distinguish, and also rather superfluous. I then decided that each of the 14 base colors would be its own block, using metadata to distinguish between the 5 shades. I considered doing the reverse and having 5 blocks for each of the shades, with the metadata being used to determine the color. I chose not to do this, however, because that would use up 14 of the 16 possible metadata states, and I wanted to leave plenty of room in the metadata of each block for future changes and additions. (Maybe when I add slabs, the double/full slab blocks will just be the regular blocks with metadata that makes them drop slabs instead of full blocks.)

And that’s when things got difficult. Being totally inexperienced in the field of Minecraft modding, I got confused when trying to add metadata to the blocks, and my code, which was honestly sort of a mess to start with, became messier. From a lack of comprehension of some of the standard practices and concepts of modding to countless numbers of silly errors like creating but never actually calling important functions, I just got really confused, and took a break from trying to code the mod because of how frustrated I got. Having jumped from one tutorial to another, all of which seemed to teach different ways of doing different things, I wasn’t really sure what to do, and at the time I still didn’t quite understand what exactly those tutorials were teaching.

Eventually though, I decided to basically clean-wipe my code and start from scratch, reworking the organization of the packages and the naming of the classes to fit my desired style, and I finally figured out some of the things I simply didn’t understand before, and soon the mod’s percentage of completion began to rapidly increase, and soon it was only a matter or copying-and-pasting and finding-and-replacing of some JSON model files before my mod was finished. By , the mod was complete, and it was only a matter of promoting it and getting it published and uploaded everywhere.

That took a while. I wanted to have my website up, running, and fairly polished before I released the mod, and I also had to take all the screenshots and make a cool release trailer. After various delays and lots of time spent, I finished my website, took all the pictures, and finished the trailer. Then it was just a matter of uploading the trailer to my YouTube channel and posting my mod to the various Minecraft mod sites and forums.

And so finally, the Colore mod is now officially released to the public! I hope to continue working on the mod and keeping it up-to-date with the latest Minecraft Forge releases, as well as make some other mods as well. Maybe a chocolate mod? Hmmm…

Oh, and by the way, the picture above is what happened when I made a silly mistake in adding the armor models. I mixed up the assets\colore\models folder with the assets\colore\textures\models folder, and broke every texture except the armor model textures. 😛


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