Update: We've added two new mods to this list. Check 'em out!
Mod of the Week: DrZhark's Magic Carpet Mod
DrZhark's Magic Carpet Mod is a mod that adds flying carpets and colored rugs into Minecraft. They can be used as decorations, and enchanted (once combined in your inventory) to become magical flying carpets. Grab it from here.
Best Mods Continued below.
Mods are everywhere these days. A game that is already all about creativity like Minecraft, you might think, mods have little to add. But of course there are things with Minecraft that could be different. Things that are lacking. And of course there are people who have played so much of it, that they want to alter their experience without going for another game. That is where the PC version of the game comes in, and the Minecraft mod community. There are tons of those out there.
In order to install these mods to your copy of Minecraft, you’ll need either Minecraft Modloader or Minecraft Forge. Those two are mutually exclusive, so take your pick carefully. Most mods do work well with both, some don’t, so a bit of research is required. But overall modding your copy of Minecraft isn’t really a very hard thing to do. So let’s have a look then, shall we?
The mods listed here are popular additions, that add things, objects, UI elements and mechanics to the game and make it essentially more interesting in one way or another. But they won’t create a “more complete” Minecraft experience. Remember, Minecraft is a game that is something else to anyone you ask. I’ve yet to meet two people who want the exact same thing out of Minecraft.
Mine & Blade: Battlegear 2 is a popular combat mod for Minecraft that focuses on providing players with interesting and balanced combat features, including new weapons, dual wielding of weapons, and a shielding mechanic. Spruce up your Minecraft combat experience with this mod for a more intense time with the game.
Get the mod here.
Dense Ores is a new mod for the 1.7 version of Minecraft, which sees the addition of, you guessed it, dense ores. This mod adds “dense” versions of other blocks that will drop 3x the amount of items that a regular ore will, and generates about 1-10 dense blocks per chunk, replacing already generated ores. It’s not perfect, but it saves players the time from having to dig for ores and gemstones.
Get it here.
Big and old and still updated, this mod takes care of Minecraft being quiet. Too quiet. It adds environmental sounds in relation to the players’ current environment, and gets rid of the perpetual silence that has haunted Minecraft forever, for whatever reason, and creates a much, much more immersive experience.
Usually I am not a fan of these polishing or high def mods, but when it comes to sound alone, Minecraft is a bit lacking. Sure, the zombies and creepers are iconic, but there is just very little else going on. This environmental sound simulation changes that, and oh boy does it ever make a difference. Give your ears something to mine on right here!
What was the point of those villages, except that you could go and protect them from mobs at night, or that they made the world seem less empty? Anyway, here’s a mod to change those villages into something useful. Need some AI to talk to? Talk to your villagers. Need a digital wife? Marry a villager. Have kids. Have the kids help around the house. Watch them grow old. Neat huh?
That’s what this mob is about. It adds male and female skins to the various villagers, and gets them to be more talkative and interactive and allows the player to almost form a kind of relationship to and with them. Peter Molyneux would be so proud of the creators of this mod. Oh and the villagers can follow you, can be assigned houses and whatnot. It adds a bit of Fable to Minecraft. And life. A lot of life actually. Makes the game somewhat more meaningful if you want that. Download here. Diapers NOT included.
Everyone knows that the Endermen are kinda sorta based on Slenderman, the Something Awful forums spawned monster that kinda became it’s own urban legend. Now there is a way to encounter Slenderman inside Minecraft itself. And good news! He brought friends!
Creepypastacraft is a mod that adds a number of mobs and items to Minecraft. Some of the mobs are hostile, some are friendly, and most of them are kinda creepy, and based on the internet based horror stories called “creepypastas”, in which users of reddit or something awful or what have you write up some neat little scare stories. The more successful ones make it to inspire others to write about the same thing with a different take. The REALLY successful ones end up as YouTube videoseries or get their own games, like Slenderman. This adds more creep to Minecraft, and a number of pretty tough monsters. Download here. Comes with in-game diaper.
Sometimes things happen that shouldn’t. Sometimes a door is not just a door. In this mod, you can create doors that lead you to a sort of warp dimension, a pocket dimension, a black lodge. Whatever you call it, this dimension is a doorway to yet more dimensions. Insanity awaits.
Actually this offers some interesting neat little travel tricks. Doors within doors, dimensions within dimensions. There even is an extra dimension deep down the well, the limbo, which the player might have to traverse when taking a wrong turn, to return to the “real” world. This mod is really neat, not just because it makes Minecraft even more like Inception. Download it over here!
Similar to Biospheres but a little less specific, Better World Generation gives you a bunch of options as to how Minecraft generates the game world. These options include a switch back to the generation rules of the Alpha and Beta versions, an improved Superflat World, improved default and very large biomes, and something special.
One of the options to create a world is called “survivor island”, which strands the player on an island in the middle of the ocean with a little chest filled with some random stuff. Another is called “survivor sky island”, which puts the player on a significantly bigger, floating island. And the third one is called “sky dimension”, which puts the player into a game world made up of floating islands. You can get the mod at Minecraft DL.
This is one of the really big ones, it’s a mod that fundamentally changes the way Minecraft’s worlds are built. Instead of separating the world into neat little divisions of “naturally” occurring landscapes, the Biosphere Mod has Minecraft create a world, that entirely consists of glass encased bubbles, that float in thin air, each of which containing a separate biome.
Those “biospheres” are interconnected by little bridges, and generate “naturally”, so completely at random. It’s a pretty radical alteration, and to top things off, this world generation can be combined as it seems with regular world generation, by turning this mode of generation on and off in the options menu. It certainly gives you a completely different game if you’re sick of your regular Minecraft world. Get it here!
This one is a bit of a cheat. With a few blocks this mod allows you to craft gigantic structures, and plop them into the world. The mod give you 24 crafting recipies that eventually give you much, much more than the sum of their parts. Technically this is cheating but, you know, sometimes you just want to go and build a whole city on a single day.
What makes this mod interesting is that there’s quite the selection of structures, subterranean ones too, that it gives you easy access to. Those structures might be rather simple but they can be used to liven up whatever you’ve got cooking in the game, especially if you want to quickly build something like a village or a town, a settlement or the like. Get it here!
Some people want to watch the world burn, but some want the exact opposite. No, not to watch the world drown, silly, but be more productive. Build, farm, mine, do some animal husbandry. For them this mod is ideal, as it allows them tinker with the stats of animals, adjust drop rates and more.
The most interesting feature is that through this mod you can create more nutritious animals, so that they give meat that replenishes more hearts more quickly. Also it gives breeding and animal herding a bit more of a reason to be in the game. All in all a neat little addition to the game, especially when you play survival. Get the mod here.
Personally I hate minimaps, but what the hell, in Minecraft, getting a proper map to work can be a pain, so why not just take the easy way in, and add a minimap through a mod? This one is handy, kept up to date, and shows you everything, from mobs to blocks in one handy corner of the screen.
Be it in survival where it’s a really useful addition, or in creative where you might need to get your bearings more easily, this mod will have your back. Never lose track of where you are again, and never lose track of what’s nearby again. Ever overlooked a diamond block? And found it only hour later? Yeah I know I have. Not with this baby. Get it here!
Ahh Explosives. With a fully explodable, err I mean explorable world like Minecraft, you’re bound to have some need for explosives. Even in regular creative mode. Want to do some serious landscaping? Get some explosives. Lay down a ton of TNT and boom! Just that regular Minecaft TNT doesn’t do much. That’s where this mod comes in handy.
Want to do some major, big ass landscaping? Erase a biome? Really play God? Have a look at this. It adds a bunch of ridiculously powerful explosives and weapons to the game, that will allow you to really go to town - and blow it all up if you want to. Just be careful, it seems to be a bit on the laggy-crashy side of things, especially with the really big ones, depending on the Minecraft version. Get it here.
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