A homage to Tekkit
Some long time friends of mine recently hit me up and asked if I wanted to join them in playing some modded minecraft: more specifically the recently released Tekkit 2.
I was first introduced to Minecraft around 2011 by those same friends, and we shortly migrated over to the world of “modded” Minecraft. “Modded” Minecraft implies the existence of fan created “mods” that modify the base Minecraft game. Some of the mods are simply for convenience: adding a minimap to the game, or waypoints to help you remember where in the world you are. Other mods add entirely new concepts to the game such as automated machines, highly customizable clothing and furniture, beekeeping, space travel, and even mining turtles that the player can program themselves in the game! At the time we spent hours playing Tekkit (now commonly referred to as Tekkit Classic): “modpack” that bundled many mods together for the player to download and install all at once.
If anything, Tekkit was something social for my friends and I to do together on the weekends. However, I can credit Tekkit with sparking some of my first interest in computers. While there definitely wasn’t any theoretical computer science on display, setting up our own private Tekkit servers for all of us to play together did require us to learn about IP addresses, port forwarding, and customizing server files. In addition many of the mods didn’t have tutorials in game on how any of their new features worked, so we all resorted to reading internet forums, documentation, and youtube videos to figure things out together (seems pretty similar to doing programming assignments in undergrad…).
Reflecting back now it is pretty amazing how Minecraft has stood the test of time this last decade. Especially with the video game market becoming the size it is now, it seems players young and old still flock back to a game with comparatively lackluster graphics and technical feats. Perhaps it has something to do with the inherent social multiplayer “sandbox” aspect of the game. The idea of going into a world with your friends and doing whatever you wanted while figuring things out along the way has appealed to many regardless of age. Perhaps the open-ended original trailer for Minecraft captured it best.
While Tekkit 2 is a bit behind in relevancy (you still need Java 8 installed to run some of the mods, and the modpack uses a version of Minecraft from 2017), it serves as evidence that Technic and modded Minecraft as a whole is still going strong. Hats off to them!