I've been surrounded by Minecraft since I was little - I was around 10 when I started going by EpicCreeper127 online - and I was obsessed years before I properly owned the game, (although we managed to get Pocket Edition installed on some devices in roundabout ways,) so I think it's definitely had an impact on my life. And it still does, though I tend to be off-and-on with it, ignoring it for weeks or months and then suddenly growing ravenous for it for a while. This page has some ramblings and little stories about the funny cube game.
I love mods. For Minecraft, yes, but in general, too. The ability to mod a game adds infinite potential to any game. Mods can fix bugs, performance issues, and other problems, (like the Minecraft stairs recipe,) making the game into what you will enjoy it more as. Some mods can change the fundemental nature of the game on their own, and even more so when compiled into modpacks, crafting specific, deeply thought-out experiences. I love building big machines and playing skyblock packs and messing with movement. All-around great time.
But my computers do not feel the same.
Historically, I first played modded Minecraft on my Macbook Air. This did not work all that well and probably contributed to its collapse. Soon I moved on to the Mac Mini, which has similar specs to the Macbook (4 gigabytes of RAM, probably similar processors,) but no battery to shred to pieces. It works for more lightweight packs (around 100 mods on versions 1.12 and below, much fewer on 1.16) but size standards must have changed in the modpack scene because I find packs with 200+ mods in the "Small / Light" section on Curseforge. For this reason, most 1.16 packs are off-limits for me. Or maybe "out-of-bounds" would be more accurate. Versions 1.17 and up have a sudden spike in resource usage (I think because of the Java version switch) so even vanilla hardly works for those. This means that my experience with mods has been quite limited, and buggy, and crash-prone, but still enough fun to keep me coming back for more.
In my most recent fall into the 16-bit clutches, however, advancements have been made. My Thinkpad has 12 gigabytes of RAM, which is enough to run many more mods. The only problem is the same one that plagued the Macbook: the battery. And it's worse with the Thinkpad, too; when I play any significant portion of modded Minecraft, the battery will start acting up and suddenly jumping down to 6% out of nowhere, in addition to the usual lifespan damage. The only way that wouldn't happen would be if the computer wasn't connected to the battery.
So I opened it up and unplugged it.
And it worked! Works, present tense, too. I have to have it plugged in the whole time, but it works! I can play bigger 1.12 packs! I can play 1.16 packs! I can play SkyFactory 4! It probably won't work as well when I have all the machines up and running! It's great. I still use the Mac Mini for smaller packs because it's more convenient, but this has opened up a lot more things to me.
"Gregtech has probably distorted my sense of right and wrong" -me, in a Java program I wrote to learn how to make Minecraft mods