Woo-hoo! After since the release of the Colore mod, I’ve finally finished the first update, which adds 70 colorful slabs to correspond with the 70 existing monochrome colored blocks already in the mod. The mod has been ported to 1.8.9 for this release, and will soon be released for 1.9 as well!
Of course, some of you may wonder… why just slabs? What about stairs? Why did it take so long? Well, to answer those questions, I’ve been quite busy lately and I’d been struggling with figuring out how to get the slabs in the mod to work since I first released the mod and began work on the 1.1 update. I am still rather new to modding, and it took quite a while for me to wrap my head around how to implement the slabs properly… mainly how to make the half-slabs stack and make the double-slabs drop half-slabs. At the time when I first released the Colore mod, I thought adding slabs would be easy, but my knowledge of the Minecraft and Forge code was pretty limited and I got confused and lost very quickly.
Eventually though, after several periods when I didn’t have any time to work on the mod and then got lost whenever I tried to start working on it again, and after staring at and observing the Minecraft code and doing some research for several hours, I finally figured out what I was doing wrong and figured out how to get the slabs working. I now understand metadata, block states, and slabs a lot better than I did before, and I’ve learned a good amount about modding in general, so (hopefully) adding stairs, fences, and etc. should be relatively easy, using what I’ve now learned.
The Colore mod, as I’ve said in my previous blog post about it, is pretty much the result of me wanting to learn how to make Minecraft mods and be able to add pretty much any sort of basic thing like blocks, items, armor, entities, and so on. That’s why I chose to make a mod about colored stuff. It was a simple concept which could be applied to a lot of basic Minecraft objects. So where do I plan to go with this mod in the future? Well, I know there IS such a thing as a mod having too many features and being too bloated, so don’t expect colored-everything to eventually be in this mod, but here are the things I intend to add in the next update, update 1.2:
- Stairs
- Fences
- Walls
- Transparent blocks, slabs, stairs, and panes
- Bows
- Shields
- Rebalancing of tools/armor for 1.9
So assuming I don’t run into any annoying problems while coding, the next update should be a lot bigger than 1.1 is. I intend to release 1.2 for 1.9 and up, but not for 1.8.9.I don’t really feel like there’s a need to backport the mod to 1.8.9 as most other mods are already starting to come out for 1.9 (and soon 1.9.4) as the changes between it and 1.8.9 aren’t nearly as big as the changes from 1.7.10 to 1.8. The vanilla block states format also changed in 1.9, and I really don’t want to create around 100 block state .json files in the old format and then re-create them all for 1.9.
As for what happens after 1.2 is finished, I intend to begin work on another update, called 1.3 (of course), and this would probably be the last update to add anything to the mod. The stuff I intend to add at this point will be some more difficult-to-code stuff, like colored liquids and glowing (light-source) colored blocks. I might also throw in transparent tools and armor, if I don’t wind up adding that in the 1.2 update. This update would be released for 1.9.4 (which Forge should be updated to by that time) and also 1.10 if that has been released by that time. Depending on how many significant changes there are, if any, in 1.9.4, I may also release that version of the mod for 1.9 as well.
After 1.3, I’ll probably go on to work on other mods (a mod all about chocolate would be cool…), but I’ll continue to update Colore to the newest Minecraft versions as long as I can, and I’ve also considered making “expansion/add-on” mods for Colore, which could feature things like color-coded redstone components (with mechanics to make yellow redstone interact with & connect to yellowish-orange or yellowish-green redstone but not interact with or interfere with orange or green or blue or red… redstone? Red-redstone? Hmmm…), a Colore dimension with custom entities (because why not and because I want to learn about custom world gen and entities), or other things that are either big and complex enough to be put into their own mod, or too superfluous for most people to want them in the base mod.
And so, being me, I’ve managed to take the very simple idea of a basic little beginner’s Minecraft mod that adds colored blocks… and then crank it up to eleven, turning it into a serious project that has tons of stuff planned for the future…
And if you’ve read this far, I guess you must be interested in the mod, so what are you waiting for? Go ahead and download it and have fun! (Unless of course you want to play in 1.9, in which case wait a couple (hopefully) days and download the 1.9 version when I’ve finished porting the mod.)