Board Thread:General Mod Discussion/@comment-25101089-20170524114315/@comment-25550759-20181119024232

I apologize if this is considered necroposting, but I have several things to say about this. I will write it in sections.

Community:

I do not think the community is dying. While I have not always been extremely active in the community, I have followed and played the mod for a little over five years now. From what I have observed, the community has mostly seemed stable, without an excessive amount of growth or decline. Personally, I attribute this mostly to lack of pubicization, which itself is indeed heavily due to the fact that the mod runs on 1.7.10. I believe that it is less so that people don't want to downgrade their minecraft, but much more that they think that because the minecraft version is outdated, the mod must be as well. I occasionally like to search the web, simply searching for outside conversations regarding this mod, but I can rarely find anything that is not dated back even to a pre-map version of the mod. This community's growth is heavily attributed to word of mouth, and as such it does not grow at a very high rate.

This being said, the community does still appear to be growing, and I honestly don't see the mod dying. Minecraft, and by extention this mod, is a kind of game that I don't believe will ever truly die, at least not without major world catastrophe or shift in societal structures. Sure, it may cease to be updated, and possibly servers will even stop working, but the game itself will live on in some aspect, even if just in singleplayer, and passed down among generations. In a sense I think of it like Pacman. In some capacity, pacman has never ceased existing, and it is far too classic to ever disappear in our world. Thus, this mod will always have a following, and a community (however small it may eventually get), regardless of what happens.

Updating:

So, should the mod be updated to a newer version? No. There are only two issues that I can see that might prompt such an update, but I believe that it is far wiser to tackle them specifically, in 1.7.10.

The first is the loss of so many players who could potentially love the mod. There are SO many people who I believe would be blown away by this mod, but who simply have no idea it exists. This is, as I mentioned before, due to lack of publicization. Yet I have a sense that the mod is actually on the brink of an exciting new age, where in fact it may begin to attract more people. I am seeing (and honestly creating myself) increasingly more fan-made content for the mod, and I believe that some of this may in fact unintentionally rope in new players.

The second issue is the lack of the actually good content that has been added in the following Minecraft updates. To many players, this detracts too much from the game, and may prevent them from playing. But, much as this mod has repeatedly added content prior to Minecraft (horses, rabbits, grass paths, fish mobs, coral, unsmelting, and soon stone slabs, not to mention countless others), I believe it could be logical and beneficial to dedicate an update to adding some of the good features from newer Minecraft versions, much like mutton was added, though on a larger scale. I'm not sure exactly what this would entail, but it would likely be much more realistic, and probably less horrifying, than updating the mod itself.

Conclusion:

This response has ended up being far longer than I had anticipated, but these are thoughts that have recurred to me for several years now, and which I find to be central to defining the mod. Of course, this is just my speculation and analysis, and it may not be completely accurate, but I wanted to express it nonetheless. Sorry for writing so much, and if you did in fact read it, thank you.

- QuinoaFalafel.