MCMOD.IT

Welcome to the "coming soon" page of MCmod.it!

I have always been a bit bothered by minecraft mod documentation's scatteredness, so I decided to buy this domain to work on a solution, even if it ends up being something small and personal.

Naming

You may wonder why I chose the name "MCmod.it".

While I am not associated in any way with the chinese-language site MCmod.cn, I have always been a fan of their commitment to documentation, and overall nice design (and I'm Italian so dot it domains were cheap). For this reason, and because of how the site's overall web design is strongly inspired by them, I figured I'd give tribute by referencing them directly.

By the way, even if you don't speak chinese, you should really check the website out! If you're armed with a translator you're gonna find out there's way more info on there than on any other english-language site.

Contact

If you're curious about this project, and you want to know more or help in some way, you can contact me at distribu7ed@mcmod.it (preferred) or at @distribu7ed on Discord.

Hello all! Well, all of the exactly four people reading this, including me and my mom. This is Distribu7ed in the flesh speaking to you.

Now, the coming soon page seems to be doing wonders at explaining what MCmod.it is, but like all great projects, at some point you're gonna have to nerd out about them on The Internet, be it for development, design, or even philosophy.

And philosophy is exactly what I am starting off with! I suppose it's to be expected from a website that was made, essentially, because some guy didn't want to use discord.

Of course, anyone who read the coming soon article will know that the main reason behind this site is to (hopefully) centralize info about Minecraft mods on a single platform, and that there's a certain personal project angle to it.

As for the last part of that, it's best to not raise your expectations too much, and take all I say with a grain of salt. But the initial section allows me to talk about some ideas that I am fairly passionate about. Let's start with the logo.

The Logo

Yes, well, a logo isn't exactly the first thing you'd think about when creating a new site... Most people would come up with something nice looking and change it once the site actually gains traction, but given I'm doing this for fun, I can also focus a bit more on branding.

The objective meaning of the icon is fairly straight-forward: like the alt-text implies, it's a curved feather and a plastic coffee cup. That's all. Thankfully though, the cup isn't for some cringe developer coffee-culture joke; It's meant to represent Java, which is both the name of Minecraft Java's programming language, an island in Indonesia, and crucially for the logo, a type of coffee. (which itself is from the island, actually)

Along with the feather, which has the kind of obvious meaning of "documentation" and "writing", it forms a sort of ink and quill. It's meant to represent the idea of a self-sufficient cycle, where open mods make open documentation, and open documentation, assuming it's good, is the fuel for making even better mods. That's kind of the niche that MCmod.it is trying to fill.

And yes, immediately, it kind of looks like it's very development-centric, even if the main focus of the wiki is to document mod content itself. I could handwave it by saying something like "well, documenting more hidden features helps with making mods too" but, to be fair, I just liked it like that. And it's a fairly recognizeable shape, so sure.

MCmod.cn??

And here's the elephant in the room. What even is that site? And how did it inspire me so much that I even referenced it in the domain name? For starters, here's a recap to those of you who haven't been looking up "为什么我的电力高炉不工作？" on like Baidu or something:

Back in the ancient year of 2012, more than a decade ago, some Minecraft fans on the other side of the Great Firewall decided to start a project for documenting Minecraft-related stuff. They called it "MC Online Crafting Recipes", and you could get to it via mcbbc.com.

Published around 2013, the site was fairly unique, as it happened to be one of the main places in China where you could get standard and unified info on Minecraft mods; something which, so far, had only been attempted the same year by the FTB Wiki, which focused exclusively on FTB modpacks.

As it grew, it went from just a cool project to, arguably, something fairly important for the modding community. By 2014 it was rebranded to "MC Encyclopedia", and that's its current name in Chinese. Despite the implication of being a vanilla minecraft site, MCmod.cn is actually a ridiculously helpful resource for learning about the contents of various minecraft mods: Compared to the more well-known sites in the west, such as the mess that are the various Fandom wikis, the Chinese modded Minecraft encyclopedia manages to be both much more active, and much more in-depth.

A popular example of this depth is their item page of Fluxtooth spores. They're a kind of niche item from Thermal Cultivation, which comes along surprisingly often in modpacks with the Thermal series. In most packs, if you ever need them, you generally grow them in the Phytogenic Insolator (Thermal's crop-growing machine), because that's all the JEI says. But did you know you can grow them on soil too??

They even have a custom model and texture! And the page clearly tells you that it grows on mycelium, on podzol, and on phyto-soil. That's what I genuinely mean when I say Minecraft Modding's documentation is scattered and lackluster: I have looked far and wide, but so far I have never found a wiki site that mentioned stuff like this. And how am I supposed to figure it out by using a Discord forum?

Quid Est Status Quo?

The Discord thing is one of the concepts that bothers me the most about this whole ecosystem. Like, okay, I can completely agree with the idea of maybe not filling up a subreddit with unrelated nooby questions about "what is this and how do I get rid of it", but the way it's being currently handled is somewhat dodgy.

First of all, I'll remove any doubts about the obvious matter: clearly, just making another subreddit for asking questions about modded minecraft isn't a great way to do it. After all, You're gonna end up with the classic story of having 99 people asking questions, and only 1 guy who answers them. Who would want to check on a forum that just asks questions, after all?

So my best guess was that the various admins of various forums decided something along the lines of: "well, our Discord server is very active, and you can make channels on discord, so it's a great way for people to both ask stuff and get replies!", and yeah! That's genuinely a good compromise! except now you are going to have even more people asking the same question, since Discord isn't indexable (aka you can't look Discord questions up on google), and people who otherwise would to that, now just can't.

Which, I mean, it's fine. It works. And as a fix for a problem, it's completely acceptable.

But should we really just go for bandages, when we could stitch up the wound entirely? I don't consider myself some magical saviour figure that's somehow going to single-handedly save the modding community, but I would like to make a precedent. It's kind of silly, but I would like to set sail for that horizon of a decent, no-compromise genuine modded minecraft wiki. And if I don't sink, that's awesome. Otherwise, maybe someone else will take my map and fix the mistakes.

Of course I'm not the only random who has figured out that maybe it would be cool if you could look up stuff about Minecraft mods. In fact, 2026 was a pretty good year for the community. One of the more obvious examples is a site called minecraft-guides.com.

First of all, how the hell did they manage to buy that domain name? Insane!! But also, their idea is very novel. Similarly to how mcmod.cn is a "Minecraft encyclopedia" despite being more about modded Minecraft, "minecraft-guides" focuses on explaining mods in a very simple readable manner, completely skipping the step of sitting through an entire video. (which is another, somewhat overlooked "sin" of modded minecraft documentation)

Their user interface is also a work of art. As you can probably tell, I'm more biased towards a more vintage-style pure HTML/CSS design, but the eyecandy on that site is something to genuinely phone home about.

What Now?

Given that I'm currently a bit focused on university, updates have been a pretty slow but constant drop of minor content. Just this blog took about half a year to start existing, after all, but the situation is fairly straight-forward:

A major part of the time spent was planning out a web design and accessibility features. Now that it's mostly figured out (spoiler: this exact page is how I plan the homepage to look, too), I'll be moving on to actually prototyping the simpler stuff, and likely I'll spend a bunch of time figuring out how to remake MediaWiki from scratch.

Well, that's kind of an overstatement, but what is true is that I can't fully use MediaWiki, as I am planning to format MCmod.it pages as data-then-article, rather than wikipedia's data-in-article. This is a fairly major inspiration from MCmod.cn, by the way, and I hope that it can help make less populated pages still more useful than the average. Think of it like a kind of open database with flavor text.

As always, if someone wants to help me achieve these ideas (and maybe if you're good in the backend side of things), you can absolutely reach out whenever you want, via distribu7ed@mcmod.it or alternatively @distribu7ed on discord (which, you know, I don't use too often, so I could miss it)

Well, that's all for now. And damn, once you actually write an article, you kind of figure out how most blogs manage to be so long. I had expected this to be barely half a monitor tall, not three. Anyways, see you soon hopefully!

Hi, i felt like writing up a small article to take log of what I've been doing so far, and just to make sure the site doesn't look dead.

As we speak we are basically in the middle of the exams season, so development is going to be considerably slower, but I have done some experiments here and there.

The Provider Question

To those of you who have some knowledge of how the secret backstage of how websites works, you may be aware that there are kind of "levels" you have to choose whenever you want a company to host your website on their servers.

The option most people choose is basic hosting. Stuff like Wordpress and site generators are very well-known and beloved by amateurs, while more technical people use a Virtual Private Server (basically an instance of linux running on someone else's machine), and many use stuff that's in-between.

To start out I figured I'd use the in-between option of a sort of "managed virtual server", which would allow for more control but an easier setup... but I got kind of caught in bushes by my choice of provider. See, to those of you who have a website, what's the last time you heard of subdomains being something you have to pay for? The nineties?

Well, and unfortunately that's only one of the issues. For starters, my provider puts me in a place where I can only use the PHP programming language. I meean, it's a completely fair and mature language, but it blocks me out of many content management systems I would otherwise need to consider, then the web interface is slow and hard to use, it's oddly expensive to renew, and there are about ten other things working against me.

So essentially the idea is to move the domain to a VPS. I have considered a handful of options, and for reasons of data security I figured to still go for an European one. Why a VPS and not another managed server? Well, they surprisingly tend to be cheaper, I like the control, and where it comes to cybersecurity, thankfully I know a few people in the field.

The Great Wiki Database

Another aspect I have thought a lot about (as you may tell from the splash) are data structures and the overall design of the database. In stuff like this, it doesn't hurt to consider every feasible option, and thankfully I have the time to sit down and do that.

The first obvious consideration is that I likely need a content management system, mostly for less-obvious things like database access, accounts, images, et cetera. There are a lot of interesting options, too. For instance, some feel much more mature but bloated, others feel lighter, and others are both light and have odd philosophies behind them. In all honesty, I wasn't expecting that much variation from software that just works in the admin side of things.

The other obvious thing is data structure itself. Well, I keep throwing around the term, but what I mean is, essentially, how is data saved in the database. To make it trivial, stuff like "are we saving multiblocks as separate things from normal machines?" or even "is copper stored as a mod's item or as an ore dictionary entry?" (which is actually a trick question: the right answer is "both").

I've drawn up some models on paper, and the closest general practice I've had success with is to, basically, follow what MCmod.cn is doing for its wiki, and tweak important aspects. It's far from complete though, and that title would only be deserved if it's future-proof enough.

UI and Layout

Graphics, graphics, graphics! You can't ever escape UI changes. The main thing I've been wondering about on that regard is the cyan background. There used to be no fading transition with the hero, and it used a direct cutoff instead, but my friends suggested me this. The more I look at it though, the more I am unsure about it. It kind of forces the background to be a solid color, and that may not be ideal as it's kind of visually boring. I've been experimenting with some textures, and maybe I'll see if I can make some repeating pattern like a wallpaper. Removing the fade may also have the nice side-effect of bringing the hero image back up a bit so you can see the modded base.

You may have also noticed the layout change: There used to be a separate blog and coming soon pages, but I unified them to make it more obvious that we aren't on a finished website. It also looks more neat I suppose.