At the end of 2024, Mojang announced a major change to the development cycle for Minecraft updates. The company revealed that it will now release smaller but more frequent updates, called game drops. Previously, developers would drop one or two major updates at most per year, with several minor fixes. Starting in 2025, Mojang started releasing a total of four game versions with new features and several smaller patch updates as usual.
While this could have been a big step for Mojang and players, it puts a lot of pressure and raises issues for the modding community. Here’s why.
Frequency of Minecraft game abandonments could be a problem for modders
Mods must be updated with every game update
Every time Mojang updates Minecraft to a new version of the game, a lot of things are worked on in the background. Developers not only add new features and fix its bugs, but also check the entire game for bugs that might arise elsewhere by simply adding new features. For example, the functionality of a new monster can cause a small butterfly effect and cause the game to stop unexpectedly.
For this reason, each new version modifies the main code of the game in several ways. This is why with every update, most modders have to update their mods as well. Simpler mods that don’t add major new features might not be affected much, but they can still misbehave and not work properly. Some mods may completely break and not let the game start.
Previously, modders typically updated their mods once or twice a year with each major Minecraft update. Now, however, they have to do it five or even six times a year, partly because of more frequent game releases. Any updated mod quickly becomes useless or corrupted a few months later if it works on the new Minecraft game.
Read also: How to get Minecraft Cloth 1.21.10
Many popular mods are now behind schedule
Since Mojang moved to gaming builds, many famous mods have fallen behind and lost popularity because of it. One of the best examples of this is OptiFine. A few years ago, OptiFine was considered one of the best optimization mods for Minecraft.
Although the gradual fall of OptiFine is not only due to the change in Minecraft’s development cycle, it also plays a major role. If we head to the mod website, the latest stable version of the mod is 1.21.4. Each version of the mod for newer versions of Minecraft is currently in the preview stage.
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Edited by Akshat Kabra
