The Cauldron Incident

Posted by brilokuloj on Oct 8, 2024

I’ve really fallen in love with modded Minecraft over the years. Minecraft is easily my favorite game of all time (in case you haven’t heard), but I personally feel like the game itself has run its course, and I’m not particularly interested in what Mojang has to offer. The updates aren’t for me, they’re to get new people to want to buy Java Edition, to squeeze whatever money they can out of a finished game. I’m more interested in modding.

I’ve been modding Minecraft since I first started playing, but always what I would consider to be “soft” mods – never anything that extensively changed the behavior of the game itself, just things like texture packs and server plugins. It wasn’t until 2019 that I became seriously invested in Minecraft mods, and even then, I had a rough start.

To say nothing of The Cauldron Incident.

When I first heard of Minecraft modding, there were so few mods available that it seemed to me like you really just picked a few and hoped they were compatible. Technically, I think the first mod I ever played with was a zoom mod for 1.6 back in 2013. Modpacks were becoming an established tradition, but at this point in time they were frequently niche and wildly gameplay-changing in a way that I wasn’t interested in.

As the world of modded Minecraft grew, it grew further and further away from anything I could grasp. The average modpack became a wholly different game. I also didn’t know how people were playing these things, and the community was so solidly disconnected from the mainstream vanilla Minecraft playerbase that I couldn’t trivially find answers.

In the late 2010s, I learned that a friend of mine at the time was really invested in Thaumcraft, a magic-themed mod that was popular with YouTubers. The world of Minecraft YouTube was yet another one of those walled gardens I couldn’t peer into, but I managed to follow just enough to understand that Thaumcraft seemed up my alley, especially since this was the same time period that I was having an involuntary “Harry Potter sucks but I wish it was better” fixation.

So I decided I would try it. But it didn’t really seem right to play with just one mod.

That’s when I found out about Rats.

I owned rats in real life. There was no way I wasn’t gonna play Minecraft with Rats. The plot was now lost. I was no longer interested in Thaumcraft.

So I made the Ratpack. Despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able to figure out where the hell this modpack is on my hard drive, but here’s a list from a server log I managed to dig up:

randompatches, aiimprovements, aquaculture, autoreglib, baubles, biomesoplenty, botania, codechickenlib, cofhcore, cofhworld, ido, mantle, placebo, quark, rats, redstoneflux, roguelike, tconstruct, thermaldynamics, thermalexpansion, thermalfoundation, vanillafix, 113_water_mechanics, phosphor-lighting, llibrary

I didn’t know most people were downloading premade modpacks by reputable modpack creators, and I thought this seemed like a lot of mods. I had no idea that the average modpack can have anywhere from 50 to 200. So I just threw together a tiny mess of things that I thought looked interesting.

So the premise of Rats is that you collect pet rats, they can do tasks for you, and you can upgrade them to do even better tasks. In short, instead of machine-based automation, you can send an army of little goobers to work your farm and sort your chests.

But in order to tame rats, you need cheese. And in order to get cheese… you need to put milk in a cauldron.

It looks really unfortunate, doesn’t it?

The more I played, the more I realized I would need more rats to accomplish my goals. I didn’t just want to mine diamonds, I wanted to go to Ratlantis, the special dimension the mod adds which has even more rats. Cheese would help me in my goals. And not just that, but cheese was also the cheapest and most renewable food source in the Ratpack by far – all I needed was cows.

But the process was so… manual. I had to take the milk from the cows and put it in the cauldron. There had to be an easier way.

I don’t remember exactly what my final contraption was, but I think it was as simple as connecting a hopper to the cauldron and filling the hopper with milk buckets – this wouldn’t have worked anyway, but I was exhausting all my options. I believe this was my final attempt after many failed attempts at making (sighs deeply) milking machines with fluid tubes.

The moment the hopper put the bucket into the cauldron was when the world was destroyed.

Even though I have all chat logs from this time period, I haven’t been able to find the error. I believe it was a “ticking entity error”, which basically means that the entity (the cauldron) is corrupted, which is somewhat understandable if it did indeed try to accept a milk bucket into its nonexistent inventory slot.

As a mature adult who knows how to deal with grief, I could only interpret this in one way: the cauldron of cum had overflowed and destroyed my world.

I spent the first half of today hunting down the world file and making my best effort to recover it. Unfortunately, it appears I didn’t back up the world file before (hopefully accidentally?) trying to convert it to 1.16.5 for some godforsaken reason, so now when I open the file it just immediately regenerates the spawn area.

I genuinely thought I would have a wonderful story for you today, one of hope and loss and triumph upon recovering my world. But it wasn’t to be. In the end, my hubris was the end of it all, and I just have to live with that.

By the way, three months later I went on to corrupt another world on another game version by trying to do this same exact thing, so I just gave up on playing Rats. Oh well, there’s other mods.

Categories: gaming

Tagged: modded minecraft minecraft