On July 28th, 2020, I released a small project in CurseForge. A mod I made to keep my mind occupied during the COVID pandemic.
I've always wanted to see Minecraft add more content around the farming and food areas of the game, even back when I played in late Alpha. So I decided to try my hand at spriting some meals. The sprites seemed popular enough with the MC communities I shared them with, and soon enough, people asked me if this was going to be a mod.
This isn't my first attempt at making mods. Years ago, on 1.7.10, I attempted to make "Age of the Artisan", a much grander-scoped mod which included the FD crops in it. Needless to say, I was naive, and bit far more than I could chew... I abandoned the idea just because I couldn't get my custom bow to zoom. 😄
After some thought, I decided to try my hand at modding again, now that I had a lot more experience with programming from work/college. And this time, it worked out!
Farmer's Delight looked quite different in the original doc I wrote for it, but I much prefer the version I ended up making now. It grew more organically, even if it has some design flaws. Many ideas came from the community, as well as a lot of code references. So in a way, I didn't create this mod alone. And I expected as much!
What I didn't expect, however, was for Farmer's Delight to take off into outer space the way it did. I believe it started when Valhelsia, a very popular modpack, gave FD a chance back then, and downloads soared out of nowhere. Suddenly, many more eyes were on this project (the number of issues also increased, hahah), and soon after, more modpacks were using it too! Over time, many other modders decided to use FD as a baseline for their own ideas, creating a mind-boggling number of add-ons for it. It's still wild to realize that my mod... has mods for it! Can you believe it?
And now, a little over 4 years later, this project has hit its biggest milestone yet...
Sadly, I couldn't get anything special prepared on time, as this milestone caught me by surprise. So instead, I want to extend a few thanks to everyone involved with this project!
- Thanks to TurtyWurty, for making a solid series of modding tutorials, which carried me through the basics all the way back in Minecraft 1.15!
- Thanks to the Create team for offering me a lot of coding assistance in the very early days, and for being amazing friends to this very day!
- By the way, Create has also hit 100 million downloads! Go congratulate them too!
- Thanks to the many, many patient and helpful folks across several Modded MC Discord servers (Violet Moon, MC Ideas Academy, MMC, NeoForge etc), to whom I incessantly asked questions to! You know who you are!
- Thanks to every single contributor on GitHub, whose pull requests helped fix many bugs, add many features, and localize the mod across several languages and countries!
- Thanks to every modpack developer that has chosen to have Farmer's Delight in there! You folks are making this project pay my bills! I hope we didn't give you too much headache with bugs and user issues! 😅
- Thanks to Moralle, for being a great friend and a top-tier moderator, banning all these pesky Discord bots across timezones when I couldn't. You're the real MVP!
- Also, they make some great mods too, such as Vanilla Cookbook! Go download it right now!
- Thanks to all the add-on developers, for extending this little project into something far more creative than I could, and even giving back to the mod in many ways, such as pull requests and concepts;
- Thanks to all the folks which ported and maintained Fabric versions of the mod, making it reach an audience I could never support on my own;
- Thanks to YOU, the player, for supporting me and my little project! I sincerely hope my mod has brought you joy, and I hope I can continue making fun projects for everyone in the future.
It almost feels unreal that this many people humored a hobby project of mine with their downloads. It has gotten to a point where the downloads have been paying me an effective salary these last few months, which was a godsend, as I'm unemployed at the time of writing this. You are all helping keep our bills paid while I navigate this episode of my life.
So... thank you! For everything! 💙
congrats!!