Installing Minecraft Mods

January 4, 2023

First, safety

You will quickly find yourself in a dark web of pages when you search for Minecraft mods. Keep your eyes on well-known forums and avoid linking to unknown ones. MinecraftForum.net is a good example. However, 9minecraft and minecraftdl can be a bit frightening so I avoid them. Many mods offer download links via AdFly. That's okay, but be careful! AdFly displays nasty ads that look like download buttons and try to trick you into clicking them. Wait a few seconds and then click the big yellow SKIP AD button. Even then, do not click on the obvious download buttons. You will have to search for the real one (it is usually 39.65KB in size). You'll eventually get better at this.

A word about autoupdating software

There are many places in mod installation that you need to run the latest version of Minecraft and then quit. Forge won't install until you've run the match version of Minecraft once. The mods folder won't appear until after you've launched Minecraft. The latest version of Minecraft won't appear in your Forge profile editor until after you've done some chicken dancing, etc. It's both a blessing because things will fix themselves and a curse because doing a clean installation requires many small steps to get things to autoupdate.

Minecraft is very easy to hack, so there are many fan-written code changes (called "Mods"). There is no official source for mods. However, there are some lists at e.g. Minecraftforum.net and planetminecraft.com are some of the sources for mods. People just google a mod or search it on youtube to find out more. There were many installation methods, and incompatibility was common. But nowadays, most mods work with MinecraftForge, which is a handy mod loader. I won't install any mod that isn't compatible with Minecraft Forge these days. So, the first step to using mods is to download Minecraft Forge.

Installing Minecraft Forge

To install Minecraft Forge, download the latest installer from http://files.minecraftforge.net (it uses an AdFly link, so see above for how to avoid getting fooled into downloading crapware or a virus), then run it, and let it install. You can find many tutorials on how you can do this.

Once it is installed, you will need to run Minecraft once. Select the Forge profile and click Play once to create the mods directory. To install a mod, download it to the Minecraft Mods folder (see below) and then open Minecraft by choosing the Forge profile. Activated mods are always active.

Locating the Minecraft mods folder

Before installing a mod, you must locate your minecraft folder. Windows: Go to Start / Run/ %appdata% or type %appdata% in the location field of Windows Explorer. Then, open Minecraft. - For Mac, click on the desktop and press Command+Shift+G. Type /Library into the location field of the Windows Explorer. Next, open 'Application Support' and finally'minecraft. - Linux: Open a terminal window and type "xdg_open /.minecraft "..." or, if you prefer working at the commandline "cd /.minecraft".

Examples

Flans

Flans mod gives you realistic options for building airplanes (not to mention Mechwarrior-like capabilities). To install it and make a World War II aircraft: 1. Follow the above steps to locate the Minecraft mods folder. 2. FlansMod-4.0.jar can be downloaded from the link on this forum page. 3. Drag FlansMod-4.0.jar from the FlansMod folder into Minecraft mods folder. Start Minecraft, make sure Flans is listed in the list of Mods and then quit 5. Check your Minecraft folder to see a Flan folder. Drag the Flans folder to which you downloaded the WW2 Pack and the Simple Parts Pack. 7. Launch a game, click on the Flans Vehicles tab to select an aircraft, place it in your world, and then test the mod. To find out the controls (e.g. Accelerate), look through the Minecraft controls settings menu. What key Accelerate is? 8. For more information on how to build a plane, see Flan's World War Two Pack Recipes or Lex's Flans Mod Showcase video.

You may have accidentally downloaded the wrong Flans mods or content packs for your Minecraft version, or the wrong Flans content pack for Flans. It worked perfectly when I tested it.

Haribote Aircraft

I was asked to locate the Zeppelin mod. However, it has not been updated for current Minecraft. So I found another one that allows you to build airships. The Haribote Aircraft Mod is available for Minecraft 1.6.2... however, the latest Minecraft is 1.6.4. Also, the download site is in Japanese so things can be a bit difficult! A tutorial video has been created by someone who explains how to install it. The key points are: - You have to download TWO mods (both YMTLib_162v3.zip and HariboteAirCraft_162v3.zip) to your mods folder - If it still hasn't been updated for Minecraft 1.6.4 yet, you have to use Minecraft 1.6.2 / Forge 1.6.2 - Mods may crash on startup when used with the wrong version of Minecraft or Minecraft Forge, so don't mix mods for Minecraft 1.6.2 with mods for Minecraft 1.6.4

If you have Minecraft 1.6.4 and its Fortge installed, you will need to do the following: 1. Rename your mods folder to (e.g. To avoid crashes caused by old mods being mixed with new minecraft / minecraftforge or vice versa, you can rename your mods folder to (e.g.

To verify that it was installed, open the game and click the Mods button. You should see the mods in the list.