FyberOptic

The problem is that Technic wouldn't be allowed to distribute any of those backups, particularly if Microsoft cracked down on the "no redistribution" part of the EULA. I'm going to guess that currently Technic pulls client JARs from Mojang's servers, but if Microsoft shut those down, then Technic (and all modpack groups) would simply be screwed. It might suck, but these are the issues you have to accept when you base yourself around someone else's product. Also you'll get no disagreement from me in regards to it being bullshit for games being so tied to the internet that one day they'll be worthless, being sold under the guise of being a benefit to the user when really they're to prevent used game sales and encourage future re-purchasing. Luckily Minecraft's login system isn't any significant aspect of the game itself, so it can live on regardless of that. Even skins could be modded to something other than a defunct Mojang server.

Speaking of drama, I thought Asie quit modding and shut down the drama generator after Microsoft bought it?

You mean the servers which were given a clear list of officially sanctioned ways that they were allowed to make money with Mojang's property? Which still made people mad, and still got Notch yelled at? I don't have a lot of sympathy for failed business models designed around someone else's work.

If you want to apply some kind of moral struggle to this entire situation, then I think people should look less at corporations consuming things, and more at the distasteful amount of entitlement and greed which turns something as trivial as the Minecraft server prompting you to accept a EULA that hadn't changed in ages into an unfathomable shitstorm of misinformation and misdirected hate towards a single man who quite literally changed all of our lives with his creation. This is why I don't blame Notch; I would be more inclined to blame every asshole who yelled at him that he was "killing servers" and every greedy server operator who riled these people up into thinking it. Microsoft buying Mojang was merely a side effect of the community's actions. Especially since this is far from the first time we've seen it happen. Anyway, what's done is done. Now we make the best of it. I mostly came back to mention that I was a bit wrong in regards to Minetest's Lua interface, which is both good and bad. The good part is that they're not just exposing some functionality through it, they actually designed the entire game around its content being scripted. All of the blocks and items are done through this interface apparently, which makes it far more moddable at least in regards to content. You still can't change fundamental ways the engine works through this, but, it is still open-source, after all. Cross-platform issues aside, the ability to mod it this much is interesting. The downside to this though is that I believe this is a big part of why the game has performance issues, because a game of this sort has quite a lot of content and has reason to call these scripts often for various in-game events. So it can't be good for performance long-term.

From the game developer's point of view, using Lua is smart. It abstracts the game in a way that they have full control over what functionality they choose to expose, they can easily release more functionality into the API as time goes on, and mods are sandboxed and can be limited to any degree, which both reduces the possibility of malware and instability to virtually nonexistent. From the modder's point of view, though, this is like wanting to write a book, but most of it is already written by someone else, and you're given a template from where you can only add or change certain words and paragraphs. For some people that might be fine. But other people want to be able to add or change entire chapters because they have a different story to tell. The template is only a hindrance for them, possibly enough so to not even bother, or to at least end up with something far less good than they planned. I personally feel that going from modding Minecraft down to its core to being restricted into a scripting language is just not an acceptable alternative. Lua is good for a lot of things, with ComputerCraft being a perfect example of it being used to its potential. But using it as a game's sole API is just not very enticing for an existing Minecraft modder in my opinion. That's why TUG gets marked off of my list immediately. Minetest still has potential because it's open-source and the API can at least be expanded by others, or mods could be written in native code, despite the cross-platform issues that introduces. Meanwhile, Terasology is not only already in Java, but is designed to be modded fairly directly, the way we're already used to with Minecraft. It even comes with the ASM library, which is the basis for low-level class transformation like the way coremods work in Forge. Whoever the dev is seems to know what modders are looking for. But I still end up coming short of promoting any of these as alternatives due to the performance, unfortunately. But I have a feeling there's other clones out there that I just haven't heard of.

I'm not going to disagree entirely. I'll also point out that Terasology appears to have a really great modular design. It's also in Java which is familiar territory for modders. It's just a shame that no matter how low I turn the settings, it still runs poorly for me. If I ever delved into its code, the first thing I'd do is rip out the fancy lighting and shadows. A voxel engine is resource-intensive enough without visual fluff. We need all the resources we can get for when complex mods are running. Where I'll disagree with you slightly is splitting up the community. Whether that's forks or clones, it tends to result in no concentrated effort in any particular direction, leading to a lot of mediocrity.

Given that there's nothing actually wrong with Minecraft at the moment, I don't see the point in switching to clones. Terasology, Minetest, TUG, you name it, they all have significant performance problems that need to be ironed out. Ironically, so does Minecraft 1.8, but even with its problems it's still the much better choice. Especially for modding.

I really thought I would have more dislike towards Notch if the rumor proved true, based on everything he's ever claimed to stand for. But after reading his post I mostly just shrug. We've all seen how people react to him over every stupid little thing, and the amount of restraint he's shown is commendable. I can't blame him for leaving it all behind at this point. I don't know if we can fairly assume that he didn't leave anything for Mojang's employees as Kaker suggests, since we know that he gave them all a tidy sum of money in the past. But I would agree though that it would be a bit of a dick move if he didn't. Other than that, yeah, I just kind of shrug to it. There's obviously things to be concerned about regarding things like the game potentially getting paid DLC rather than the free updates we're used to, and of course the whole modding aspect. I've never assumed that Mojang's API will be a replacement for Forge, but them finally putting one out (if that's even a possibility anymore) could be their justification to go after the unauthorized modding. Not that that's going to stop me, but it would hurt the community that's grown from Mojang's relaxed stance on it. cpw quitting isn't a big deal. Neither is mDiyo. It's all open-source in both cases, and both have hinted at leaving before. And there's more than enough talented people in the community to fill the roles and/or make alternatives. Even in the worst-case scenario where MCP is shut down, there are even people who can still deobfuscate the game. I've been doing it myself, even, and I don't pretend to be an expert. It's a disappointing day, certainly, but I think there's just a lot of overreaction. They can't take Minecraft away. Certainly not the existing versions which are still plenty fun and plenty moddable. The worst they can do is fuck up future versions to the point that we have to unfuck it for them, for as long as that's viable. Modders have already been fixing Mojang's bugs for years, after all, so it's just another challenge. And that's if it ever even comes to that.

Somebody asked about 1.7.2, so I added a patch for that version as well, if anyone needs it.

It's a funny situation, because technically I released the source code to my fix in the post, as well as the instructions for how to repeat it, which should mean there's no license issue, including in its redistribution. But due to the way I did it, it's certainly not a conventional method of patching open-source code, since the original class file hasn't been recompiled, just manually added to and modified. You should be able to do it from the standard add/remove programs. Then install Java 7 afterward.

I also use Java 7 coincidentally enough, but the problem piqued my interest enough to see if I could do anything about it. I'm sure it would be frustrating to do a fresh install on a brand new PC and then suddenly you couldn't play your favorite modpack anymore. There's no reason I can think of why modpack makers can't incorporate the fix into their 1.6.4 packs if they want, particularly on Technic and ATLauncher where Forge is per-instance.

I thought I'd link this here in case anyone actually wants to use Java 8 update 20 or above on Minecraft 1.6.4. I included instructions for fixing Technic packs.

You can transmute base metals, but it's not a very practical system. I think it's probably only useful for getting gold out of armor dropped as loot, maybe.

I agree with everyone saying that EE is overpowered, but that doesn't mean it's not fun. I used it to build an HV solar factory on multiple levels of a building once on the server I played on, and then had more EU than I ever needed. Didn't matter that I ruined the balance, it was entirely satisfying to accomplish that. Then we eventually moved on to a different world where I avoided EE altogether, as an entirely different challenge. And it's not really that much different than MFR having a mining machine that pulls materials from nowhere these days, or generating endless dimensions with Mystcraft and quarrying or digital mining them out for infinite resources.

No, Xeno made the mod originally. When he got tired of it after EE2, he let Pahimar maintain it, but it was decided to never port that version forward. Pahimar then went on to make EE3 instead. Xeno made a return for a time with new stuff like Xeno's Reliquary, which was basically a mod of just similar power items to EE2, which was then passed off to someone else when Xeno left again. But then I think Xeno came back for a time and helped bring it to 1.6. Though I think he's probably vanished again.

The source code to most of the old launcher stuff is on Github if you were dedicated enough to build it, but you're obviously not going to get the packs with it. You could try to find a mod and version list from whichever pack you want to play from that time period, and if you're lucky, you might be able to piecemeal it together. But speaking from experience it can be hard to find working download links for very old stuff, and some of the mods won't always work right under modern launchers like MultiMC unless you patch it yourself. I think I had to do that for AudioMod for beta 1.7.3, for example. Depends on luck and how much effort you're willing to put in, I guess.

I know that they updated the launcher with 1.2 but I don't know how drastic the change was. I guess you'd just have to try it and see. I'd be curious to know.

The website alone isn't always a good indicator. You can always look at a site like this one and tell whether it's a problem on your end or theirs. Another thing of note is that if you open a second launcher, then try to use a modpack out of the first launcher, you'll tend to run into login token error issues. I don't believe that's your problem in this case, but you did mention checking other launchers during all of this, so it's a good thing to keep in mind. If you ever see an error like that, just close them all and open the one you want to use again and the token issue in particular should clear up.

The Forge installer only installs into the vanilla launcher. If you want to play a custom set of mods, you can use that launcher, or something like MultiMC which lets you manage Forge and mods pretty easily. You could also just use one of Technic's own packs in their launcher and swap out mods with what you want or take out what you don't need. It's all pretty versatile.

In 1.7 they're not totally removed, it's still possible to access them, but most of the standard game methods now work with a block's class (or sometimes string ID) rather than the old numeric versions. This is nice because you don't have to configure any of this anymore to play the game, it just auto-assigns them and keeps track in your world save. It doesn't take care of IDs for potions, villagers, dimensions, enchantments, biomes, etc, though. But at least that's far less of a hassle, if you even encounter a problem. Even though they can still be accessed, it's best to move away from them entirely, because with the introduction of block states in 1.8 (which is designed to replace metadata) the old block IDs will be far less relevant to what is actually in a space, since a single block will be capable of taking up multiple block IDs.

You're going to have a really hard time porting this mod. A lot changes over these versions. As planetguy said, the most drastic you would be facing is between 1.2.5 and 1.3 where the client/server integration happened. That alone will require you to put a lot of work into merging the separate client and server versions of EE2 into a single mod. The next worst is between 1.4 and 1.5 when all textures had to be separated out and registered by their respective blocks so that they would get merged into the primary texture atlas (which was a big performance improvement). 1.5 to 1.6 was a bit less significant, more change to how resources are used was the biggest thing I remember, so you can usually skip 1.5 entirely when thinking about porting. 1.7 changed networking a bit and started doing away with block and item IDs. I've personally spent considerable time working on bringing 1.4.7 code to 1.6.4 (as a stepping stone to 1.7.x from there), and even that was a major pain. Bringing 1.2.5 mods is far worse. But you might be happy to know that in the case of EE2, people are already doing it. Some people have tried to rewrite the mod to be entirely faithful, others just try to replicate what it did. Project: Exchange is the most recent I heard about. That, and another from someone who was still waiting for permission from X3no for their direct clone, but I don't think that's coming. I agree with planetguy that it's not impossible, it's all just a matter of how dedicated you are to making your own port, and how close you want it to be without treading on others' toes.

Even when there's a version of your favorite pack(s) for 1.7, chances are you won't be able to directly bring your old world over without some things breaking. Mostly depends on what your existing world is built out of.

A lot of people didn't like EE3 but I thought the minium stone performed a fine purpose. It was still useful in those cases where you've been building towards crafting something big but ended up lacking like a single diamond or gold or something, and it was just easier to exchange something for it than to spend twenty minutes mucking around underground for it. I tried EE3 in 1.7.10 and it doesn't seem to actually do anything anymore though. Not even a minium stone.

I believe that this was added specifically to cater to the Twitch streamer Aureylian. But yeah, it's a bit silly.

Yeah it's always daunting to have to learn a bunch of new mods, but you can start with what you know and take the other mods one step at a time if necessary. Luckily Technic tends to always have a nice wiki for their packs to help with that.