Heck

.. is a Minecraft 1.18.2 Forge modpack. It features a little bit of everything: Technology, magic, exploration and building / decoration mods. The primary use case for this pack is for a private server we're running for friends, fellow VTubers, and their friends.

Heck comes with a modest amount of configuration changes and KubeJS scripts that aim to make our mods work together well, fix minor issues, improve balance, change and add recipes, and most importantly unify most items and materials in the pack which would otherwise exist in multiple formats. We also have a couple of texture and localization changes to make things fit together well.

• For a list of mods including short descriptions, see docs/MODS.md.

Download / Installation

The modpack is currently only available as a self-updating PolyMC / MultiMC instance.

• Download and install PolyMC (recommended) or MultiMC, if you don't have it already.
  These are third-party Minecraft launchers that simplify managing multiple instances of the game.
• Make sure you have Java 17 (or higher) installed on your system.
  You can check this by going to "Settings" in your launcher and go to "Java".
  When you click "Auto-detect" and a version 17.x.x appears, you can select it here.
  If not, you can download the right Eclipse Temurin version, and install it.
  These are an alternative to the "official" Oracle Java releases, though I recommend them.
• To add Heck to the launcher, click "Add Instance", select "Import from zip",
  and paste this: https://meowface.org/copygirl/Heck.zip
• On first launch, packwiz will download all mods and other modpack files.
  On future launches, it will automatically check for updates and apply them.

When updating the modpack, not all changes might be applied, because some settings are stored per world, which won't be overridden by the update process. If you're just playing multiplayer, this won't matter to you. If you're playing singleplayer however, you might want to copy the contents of the defaultconfigs folder into your world's serverconfig folder every now and then.

Server Setup

Grab the latest packwiz bootstrapper and Forge installer - the recommended version can be found in our pack.toml. The entire installation process on the server side will look a little something like the following, assuming you have Java 17 ready and set up as the default. Otherwise just point any of the java commands to the correct executable.

# Download the required bootstrapper and installer.
# Adjust if necessary, such as if a new version is available or required.
wget https://github.com/packwiz/packwiz-installer-bootstrap/releases/download/v0.0.3/packwiz-installer-bootstrap.jar
wget https://maven.minecraftforge.net/net/minecraftforge/forge/1.18.2-40.1.68/forge-1.18.2-40.1.68-installer.jar

# Download modpack files. Also run this to update.
java -jar packwiz-installer-bootstrap.jar -g -s server https://meowface.org/copygirl/heck/pack.toml
# Changes made to files in `defaultconfigs` during updates are not applied to existing worlds.
# Therefore it is advised to copy them over by running the following command.
cp defaultconfigs/* $WORLD_LOCATION/serverconfig/

# Download Minecraft and Forge files.
java -jar forge-1.18.2-40.1.68-installer.jar --installServer

# Now do the usual, accept the EULA, edit your server
# properties, run your startup script as you're used to.
java -jar -Xmx6G -Xms6G forge-1.18.2-40.1.68.jar nogui

Development

Working on the modpack requires the packwiz tool, so be sure to download it first.

packwiz update --all # Update all mods to latest.
git commit [...]     # Now you can commit your changes..
git push             # ..and push them to the repository.

It should be noted that packwiz will keep an index.toml file and update pack.toml to keep track of it, mirroring any changes. However, since these changes are basically build artifacts, we decided to not include them in the repository.

# Make sure git will not see any changes to pack.toml.
# This is to avoid accidentally committing the [index] section.
git update-index --assume-unchanged pack.toml

To test changes tocally, you can run packwiz serve to deploy a simple webserver that just hosts the modpack files. Setting your instance's pre-launch command to the following command will allow it to update from local files when starting up.

"$INST_JAVA" -jar packwiz-installer-bootstrap.jar http//localhost:8080/pack.toml

While the game is running, you can use rsync to synchronize the kubejs/ folder after making changes. This allows you to make, for example, recipe changes and test them out in-game, without restarting, simply by running the /reload command.

# Just replace $PATH_TO_INSTANCE with your instance's location.
rsync -r --delete kubejs $PATH_TO_INSTANCE/.minecraft