Adventures in modded minecraft administration

I've made no secret that I enjoy minecraft, I've even gone out of my way to make a few modpacks in the past (Although I haven't worked on it in nearly a year: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/wayward-souls) 

But good lord does administering for it just become a nightmarish pain in the rear. From everyone and their mother introducing yet a different and newer variation of copper ore (Thermal Foundation, Immersive Engineering, etc) all the way to the absolutely crazy TPS lagging things that you just don't expect. 

Modded minecraft is a virtual minefield of what happens when you don't have a QA department for your codebase or completely lack standards. While each and every modded software at some point must use Forge or Fabric, each mod creator is free to do things as they please, from naming convention to recipe overlap. 

And look, this was literally inevitable, there are hundreds and hundreds of mods and even the smallest of the major modpack is using around 50 of them. That's 50 different programming projects from folks of various skill levels and ability to dedicate their time to the issues at hand. That doesn't even start to get into the mods that are popular but no longer maintained (Your Thaumcrafts, etc). 

Mod and Modpack authors have a ton of work to do. Just take a look at the work that I did for Wayward Souls (https://github.com/Alnarra/WaySouls), and that isn't even a good or complete modpack. A lot of that is just work to get various mods to work together (Getting cooking for blockheads to see X as food or getting the various book shelf mods to see certain books as well... books. 

I think my biggest frustration with modded minecraft is that there are 32 wheels that have been invented that are all perfectly fine wheels, but we for whatever reason feel the need to add a 33rd. I almost wish like forge there was a standard library of things every mod can pull from. Like here's Forge "Stuff that comes standard" 

You want copper, just invoke Forge.Copper.Generatee = True. And yes, I get it, you try to come up with a standard and 7 more attempted standards will no result in a total of 9 different standards that no one can agree on.

I guess I wish (oh god) there were stnadards for Modded Minecraft Coding, Testing, Naming Conventions, etc. There won't be, because this is the internet and even the IEEE and can't get people to listen to things, half most likely a bunch of internet strangers. 

So while my dreams of a minecraft IEEE are probably never going to happen, mostly because well this is the internet and in writing this post alone I've probably spawned 6 new variations of copper ore. It is at least soothing to myself to think about ways that this /could/ be fixed. I think one of the hardest things has been the fact that Minecraft by and large seems to stay about 3 versions ahead of the modded community

Even as mods for 1.16 are being made, the vast majority of minecraft mods still sit at either 1.12 or 1.7.10 as those were the two big periods in which minecraft thrived. So a lot of the bug fixes applied in minecraft itself in things like version 1.13 and 1.14 haven't shown up yet in the modded world. 

Anyway that's my rant for the day, I still love all you mod and modpack authors, you keep doing you.