Playing Beta Minecraft
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Playing a 14 year old version of a game comes with its own challenges. Credit where it’s due, Minecraft has rotted pretty gracefully. As far as I’m aware - if you run beta 1.7.3 on Windows or Linux with Java 1.8, it will run fine. On macOS, it’s a little trickier. If you start up the game, you’ll see something like this with the colors inverted:
This seems to be an endianness issue. On little endian machines (like aarch64 macs), lwjgl 2 seems to expect bgr colors instead of rgb. I’m not entirely sure why, and the existing fixes don’t come with any explanation about how their fixes actually solve the problem. If anyone knows more about this, please contact me at [email protected].
Choosing a Launcher
Before I talk about fixing the problem, the first thing we need to do is figure out how we want to launch the game. We need to modify the game’s jar file in order to run any modifications - or an inverted color fix. In the old days, this used to be done by manually opening the jar file, dragging in some modified classes, and re-packaging it again. This is not quite so lovely, so players have come up with launchers that can apply patches to the jar for you. There is a launcher called betacraft which applies a very specific fix mod, but this launcher had signing issues on macOS so I opted not to run it.
Instead, I looked at MultiMC and Prism. Prism is a hard fork of MultiMC that came about after a disagreement between the current MultiMC maintainer and the original authors. I ended up using Prism because it seems much more actively maintained. In Prism, after creating a profile for your desired Minecraft version, you can click on the profile edit button, go to the “version” tab, and click on the “Add agents” button which will let you select another jar-file whose contents get applied to the game jar itself.
The Beta Modding Ecosystem
Modding beta Minecraft has changed quite a bit in the last couple years.
Originally, you would use a tool called Minecraft Coder Pack or MCP for short. This tool would allow you to decompile and recompile Minecraft & create what are known as “jar-mods” which directly change the game code. Jar-mods typically have very poor compatibility with each other since two mods that override the same file will end up with just half the required changes.
This is where modding APIs come in. Modding APIs come in the form of a single jar-mod that can pull in multiple other modifications that are instead consumers of a common API. Because each mod is an independent module, they often behave much better together. The first mod loader for beta 1.7.3 was the now deprecated ModLoaderMP (original thread). Some new mods are still written for this API or modern forks of it, but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem to have as much steam behind it.
A more modern approach seems to be Babric with StationAPI. Babric is based on the relatively new FabricMC project which was started as a fresh project for modding release 1.14.0. Fabric is roughly equivalent to MCP in that it provides utilities for compiling and decompiling the game jar. It then has a FabricAPI layer which modders consume to actually implement their mods.
Babric is a fork of Fabric which back-ports the toolchain to beta and alpha versions of the game, and Station API is a modding API that seems reasonably inspired by the FabricAPI.
I’ve decided to go with this Babric + StationAPI combo since it seems to be the way new mods are getting written for beta 1.7.3 and has the best community support. A large selection of Babric and StationAPI mods are available on the Modrinth platform, including ports of popular mods like the Aether to this new toolchain.
You can set up a Babric profile in Prism by adding this custom profile. You can then go to the “mods” tab, click on the “add mods” button, and search for “StationAPI”, and install the API mod. Then, you can install any other compatible mods that you fancy.
Fixing the Color Issue
Now that we understand the modding ecosystem, we can look at fixing the macOS color inversion problem.
The first fix comes in the form of betacraft’s legacyfix mod. You can download the latest version, add it as an agent, and you’re off to the races. It has some additional patches like fixing Minecraft skins too. If you don’t want any further mods, this is probably a good option to go for.
The second fix that I know of comes in the form of a Babric mod called gambac. I ended up going with this option because it works with the Babric mod loader which gives better compatibility with other mods.
How I Set Up My Game
There are a wide range of mods available for Babric & StationAPI that can completely change your game. I was quite keen on staying within the “spirit” of beta 1.7.3. This manifested as only choosing mods that improved quality of life without changing any gameplay mechanics.
The current list is as follows:
- StationAPI - to support StationAPI mods
- Glass Networking - a networking library that GlassConfigAPI requires
- GlassConfigAPI - a configuration API that a handful of StationAPI mods use
- Gambac - for fixing macOS related issues
- Fov Slider - in beta 1.7.3 the FOV is fixed to 70 so this lets us change it to a more reasonable 90
- Inventory Tweaks - brings modern inventory management shortcuts as well as a few additional tweaks from its modern namesake
- BH Creative - adds a creative world type that I can use for experimentation
- Rei’s Minimap StationAPI port - the OG Rei’s Minimap mod ported to StationAPI
I was a little on the fence about adding a minimap mod. I’m pretty good at navigating in Minecraft, but it is nice to be able to make waypoints. I would prefer something more thematic like the Antique Atlas mod so I might consider back-porting it at some point.
Thank you to calmilamsy who spotted that Fabric came out for 1.14.0, not 1.8.0. He also clarified that the mod requiring Glass Networking was in fact GlassConfigAPI.