Category: News

Woo-hoo! After nearly 6 months 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.)

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 5:00 p.m. CT on Monday, October 12, 2015, 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. 😛