Exploding Vindictive Bees

Posted by brilokuloj on Oct 9, 2024

Despite the joy it brings me, the modded Minecraft scene is not what I would describe as a friendly place overall. In fact, ever since the very beginning, the average modded player has had a stick wedged firmly up their crafting table.

This is in large part because the earliest Minecraft mods didn’t just aim to add on to the game, but rather to transform the gameplay altogether. A noble goal, but one built on a pessimistic opinion: vanilla Minecraft is just not good enough. The common factor of the community is a shared resentment, one I have unfortunately participated in myself, and that kind of environment brings elitism and negativity.

Today’s story is about the time someone ruined the fun for everyone with exploding bees.

Forestry is a large Minecraft mod, very expansive for the time (roughly around Minecraft 1.5). It aims to provide more depth to farming, with automatic machines, renewable energy sources, and – most relevantly – beekeeping.

These years were the wild west of Minecraft modding, and as I mentioned in my cauldron story, modpacks weren’t as much of an institution as they are now. Forestry was developed by SirSengir (who, as an aside, is marked as red by Shinigami Eyes) to be primarily compatible with the mods BuildCraft and IndustrialCraft 2. He explicitly forbid players from including the mod in any other modpacks without his permission.

This idea was annoying, but understandable: the average Minecraft player is not very bright, and if one mod isn’t compatible with evil_steve500’s Five Fucks At Uncle Fubby’s VR Edition Modpack, now the mod developer is expected to do tech support to find the conflict against potentially hundreds of mystery mods. All of this was happening while Minecraft modding was very new and fresh.

What isn’t understandable to me is why SirSengir thought the appropriate answer to this was exploding bees.

The legend goes that if Forestry was located in a folder named “technic” (i.e., the Technic modpack), it would activate a block of code that would cause the “Vindictive” species of bees to explode when you approached them. Vindictive Bees were only one out of the over 200 species of bees you could collect, but as many players’ goals were to “collect ‘em all”, it wasn’t impossible that many high-level players may have had their bee farms destroyed.

This functionality was eventually mercifully removed, and Forestry continued to be a popular mod for years to come – in fact, I remember the general sentiment in the community around Minecraft’s official bee update was “meh, Forestry bees were better”. I don’t personally care to engage in the alleged amount of eugenics the mod requires, but I can see why it’s stuck around for so long. It took a while for trust to fully rebuild, but this was the incident that cemented Minecraft mega-modpacks as an unavoidable inevitability and not just a short-term fad, for better or for worse.

But seriously, why exploding bees?

Categories: gaming

Tagged: bees modded minecraft minecraft

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