Bob Hooper's Tech and Art diary

Achievements, Projects, Thoughts and Ramblings shared with the world.

> cat /blog/minecraft-datapack.md

Minecraft data pack: Monster Madness

I have a fond memory from the early days of Minecraft, pre-1.0, of downloading a mod from the forums and turning the (relatively) safe world of Minecraft into a dungeon hellscape. Digging down a couple of blocks you would be greeted by a labyrinth of monster spawners, loot chests and moss. It was unplayable and yet fantastic. The original mod has now been lost over time but not forgotten.

Inspired, I have recreated this mod best I can into a Minecraft data pack, featuring:

• Multiple spawners generating on top of each other
• Monster sounds following you in every cave
• Improved rewards found in every chest.

I have published the source code on GitHub. And shared on Planet Minecraft.

Learning points:

This was my first foray into Minecraft data packs and after tinkering around I have learnt a lot.

The first learning points is that data packs are just JSON — all of the complicated implementation has been done for you. This is good, enabling beginners to put together a simple mod without prior experience, however I miss the control directly modifying the codebase provides.

It was quickly apparent how complicated Minecraft world generation is when it all comes together. For this mod I originally looked into creating new feature sets, however they wouldn't take effect until each biome had been modified. I didn't want to edit each biome file to achieve this — at the time of writing there are 64 biomes! Editing biomes also raises concerns about compatibility with other data packs.

As the saying goes Keep It Simple Sausage.