The talents of the modding community run laps around the core game devs. Unironically the best thing that could happen for Minecraft is if everyone moved to something like minetest and started making mods for it instead.
Tbh I'd prefer if the core game just stopped updating so that mods can all keep to one version of the game.
But minetest already has feature parity with Minecraft, runs significantly faster, and is free and libre (which makes it significantly easier to write mods for). If you want to log into a server running a set of mods you just put the URL in and minetest fetches and installs the mods for you automatically. Instead of fighting the core devs, the mod devs could work with them.
The talents of the modding community run laps around the core game devs
not really.
yes, really. the amount of issues with the base game that get easily solved by modders is astounding. putting iris + lithium + indium + entityculling immediately makes the game run like butter on 99% of hardware. and that's just performance. easymagic and easyanvils fix the enchanting and anvil systems respectively, tetra fixes tool progression almost completely, modders added in all three mobs from the mob vote like a day after release. I could go on.
Those mods are developed by lots of different people and there's a pool of hundreds or thousands of mod developers. You can't compare that output to a single team. Everything in the base game also has to not break backwards compatibility or balance, or need to be removed later. They also spend time developing complex mobs like that new bouncy thing, and making sure they don't have major bugs or performance issues (since they interact with everything else in the game). The team also develops the game systems and rendering and so on. They've done big overhauls to the chunk format multiple times, including increasing the world height, completely redoing how liquids are stored, more flexible block storage, smoothing out new terrain generation after updates, etc.. While keeping backwards compatibility to allow worlds to be incrementally updated to the new format.
And anything in the base game needs to work for 100% of game installs and servers. Mods are only installed by a small fraction of users (and they often have all sorts of bugs).
A modder could get 90% of the way to something worrhy of being in the bade gsme. It's the last 10% that's hard.
I like that modders have had to start establishing safe harbor with disclaimers to not use their work to slander & how much they respect the official version of the game™️. Very cool.
