Everyone knows the name “Minecraft” by now, even non-gamers. The title managed to quickly rise to the top of the PC market and then it took over consoles as well, and currently it’s enjoying a great deal of popularity among fans of all ages. One of the reasons why “Minecraft” got so popular in the first place was the openness of the game and the ability to easily write mods that expanded its gameplay in all sorts of directions.
This allowed the community to not only fix problems that were left over from the developers, but also add their own new features, and over a period of time, the game basically explored all possible gameplay additions and changes that players could think of. It became one of the best-known examples of moddable PC titles, and this fame stuck with it for quite some time.
After the acquisition of the game by Microsoft, some of its fans have been worrying that they might lose their modding support. But that’s not the case for now, as the company has been allowing fans to mod the game just as easily as before. They are also working on a new installment which will likely come with more limited modding support, but that’s a different story.
One of the more popular mod packs has just had a new version released for it, namely the “Arestian Dawn” pack. It’s now reached version 1.8.8 which comes with many improvements and bug fixes, and players have been reporting an excellent experience with the new release of the pack. Among other things, it comes with larger textures that should be a nice improvement to players who have a more powerful computer that can handle the game properly.
The pack comes with 32x textures – or in other words, 32×32 instead of the standard 16×16 used by regular “Minecraft”. It’s not just about the resolution though, as the textures are also noted to have been created with a lot of care and effort to ensure that they fit well together and look overall nice. There’s a huge difference between simply releasing a pack of large-sized textures, and actually making the game look better with them, and this mod pack is one of the better examples of this.
And yet, despite the hard work, Void1313 – the author of the mod pack – claims that it’s still far from finished, with about 70% of the work having been done so far. We don’t know what’s planned for the future – even though the author talks about this from time to time, the plans do keep changing quite often – but we expect a lot of greatness from this mod later on, as it’s already proven to be very popular in the community.
There are some prerequisites for using the mod – mainly, players have to use MCPatcher for installing the pack properly, as it has some dependencies within that tool. Alternatively, they could also install “Optifine” manually and use that as the basis for the installation of the mod.
As good as the modding for “Minecraft” is in general, it also has some problems that players regularly point out. The biggest issue is the complexity in installing some mods as we described above, as there are lots of dependencies between certain mods and mod packs, and sometimes the situation can actually be quite messy and can take a lot of time for a player to fully install everything that they need to play their game modded.