There’s also the problem of those dependencies breaking the main game – if a player installs mods in the wrong order, for example, or if they install something that’s not compatible with another mod, this can lead to the game crashing.
And there’s often little indication what the problem is, as some mods are written by directly changing the code of the game itself. Because of this, there are no safeguards that would protect the main game from crashing, something which modders have had to deal with for a long time now.
The reason “Minecraft” was able to be modded like this was because the game is written in Java, and this allowed for immediate access to its source code after decompiling. Java is unique among compiled programming languages in that it can be converted back to source code.
But now that the game is allegedly being rewritten in another, more efficient language, things might change soon. We don’t know if the new “Minecraft” will have the same kind of modding support as its predecessor, but many fans have been hoping for that as otherwise it would mean losing one of the main points of attraction for what was one of the most popular video games of all time. Hopefully, Microsoft aren’t going to let that feature go.