What are /r/ModdingMC's favorite Products & Services?

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For many people, especially for children, it's very important to start learning a field with a tool which allows to get interesting result in a small time. Starting modding minecraft from learning java is opposite: you need to grasp a lot of "boring" things like inheritance or garbage collection which are completely irrelevant to gameplay process. Did you heard of scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/about/) and similar systems? For young minecrafters mcreator may be the same thing but in minecraft setting.

From what I can gather the parts that are mostly zeros are unused space

Have you managed to read the chunk offsets from the first 4kib? Those first 4kib should tell you where the chunks are stored in the file then at that position you should be able to extract some NBT data as described here

Also there is an old java library to read NBT data JNBT, I'm not sure if it can handle region files but it might be worth a look

Hmm, im honestly not sure. lots of people have issues with the vanilla launcher, my suggestion is always to install multimc, its a better launcher all around. Can be found here if you want it: http://multimc.org

You just create the instance. Right click and select 'edit instance' and install forge with the button. Much easier.

If you really want to use the vanilla launcher i would suggest making backups of your .minecraft and then deleting it, i think a reinstall might fix it.

I would not recommend using any of the popular launchers, because getting a pack on one is difficult or not even possible

MultiMC is a great tool for building multiple minecraft instances for testing/play purposes. You can share instances(read the instanced folder) with other players that user MultiMC. It makes for drag and drop installations on their part. MultiMC has many other features that make it worth using such as the ability to modify the launch settings of minecraft or a one click forge install.

Otherwise you can share a mod folder, however your players will need to have minecraft and forge properly set up.

As far as the server goes, hosting just involves running the forge server jar with all of the mods in the folder. This Youtube Video does a decent job of the step by step process of creating a modded forge server. If you are willing to pay, you will probably have a better experience using a host. However, I highly recommend that you follow the tutorial, create, and host your own sever so that you are aware of all of the ins and outs of the process (and can gauge what kind of machine you are willing to pay for to host the server).

Be wary that several of those mods are resource hungry and you can experience lag ect. Issues will occur like the server not being dedicated enough ram or the processor being overloaded. This is much more noticeable if you have the server running on a machine that you are also playing on.

Good luck! Building and running servers is very satisfying, don't give up if you get stuck.

You can get IntelliJ IDEA here: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/#section=windows

But in the end: Use the editor/IDE you are most comfortable with, IntelliJ IDEA can be overwhelming with features in the beginning.