If you’re like me, you’ve grown tired of playing the vanilla version of Minecraft. After a few hours it stops offering much new to build or do, unless you’re in it for the endgame. And after that, then what? The answer for many of us is to dip into the large world of Minecraft mods, including the modpacks which are so popular right now.

However, if you’re trying them out for the first time modded Minecraft can be a pain to use, and you need to pay attention especially to the version of Minecraft a mod or modpack uses. This became much easier with the second version of the Minecraft launcher which allowed for the launching of the present and past versions of the game, but matching mods to other mods in a game can be a tricky business, especially if they don’t all run on the same version of Minecraft. So what gives? Why aren’t all mods updated to 1.7.10 already, or 1.7.9 at the very least?

Earlier on the /r/minecraft sub-reddit board user Vazkii tried to explain the process of updating a mod and the reasons why it might take a long time. At the basic level, javacode is often very confusing and messy to our human eyes; difficult to make sense of. A computer though has no problems doing so, which is why the game will still run properly. And hard-to-read code is only the start of a mod-maker’s problems. For one thing, each version of Minecraft will edit the rules of how something might be read by the computer.

“Minecraft code is actively changed, removed, moved, renamed, repurposed, so on. Every version something changes, because if it didn’t change, there’d be no need for a new version right. And of course, every mod that relies on that will break.” they wrote, giving examples such as the time the game updated from reading an ID number to a string to determine what a block was supposed to be made of and its ‘rules’ of behaviour within the game engine such as durability and whether or not you can mine it with a stone pickaxe or need something tougher.

Every time Mojang update their code, so do the mod-makers. And from experience, I can tell you that it’s time-consuming, often tedious work. After all, making sure that a mod is reading information from the right place takes time, as does updating all the relevant strings to read from the right areas of other code you might have once input. Even one mis-spelling could bring all that wonderful coding crashing down to a very frustrating halt.

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