Buy and install the PC version of Minecraft. This is the best version for mods. Even though I had the xbox version and the tablet version, I still needed to buy this. They don’t even link together. But it was still worth the money, because of the added fun from mods. You buy it here. At the moment it costs £17.95. With this you can download the software and you get a userid which allows you to run it on a few PCs, but not concurrently, and not to easily share worlds between the PCs with the same userid.
Next you need Forge. You download this from here. There are different versions of Minecraft. The latest one is 1.8. However I’ve found that most mods work on 1.7.10. So select 1.7.10 and select to download the recommended installer-win. Be careful not to click on the ads that say “Start Download” etc. Run the client version of it. Later you might also run the 1.8 version etc to add other mods.
Start up Minecraft. Log in and edit your profile to use the 1.7.10 version. Have a quick game on that version to get the directory files set up. Then restart it and switch the profile to Forge. Edit the Forge profile to use the 1.7.10-Forge version.
Now you need the mods. The best and safest way to get these is to take advice from DanTDM on youtube. Watch his video reviews of mods and choose one that you want. In the information section below the video click on the “SHOW MORE” button. This will bring up a line saying something like “► Get this Minecraft 1.7.10 Mod” and a url which you should click on.
Now comes the hard bit. You need to find the right download, rather than clicking on all the ads which also say “download” but are to things that you don’t want. Click on the download button.Often you will be taken to an AdF.ly page. This is an advert that pays for the development of the mod. Don’t be tempted to click any links on this page. Just wait for the five seconds until the button changes on the top right corner to let you click through to the real download. Hopefully it will allow you to download a .jar file. If it’s an .exe then steer clear of it. If it’s a .zip file it might be ok, you’ll need to open it carefully and make sure there’s nothing dangerous inside, hopefully just a .jar file which you can extract. Some mods will have a couple of jar files as if they’ve written multiple modes they may have put common code in a shared library. If you don’t trust it then don’t take the risk. There are plenty of other mods which are just as fun and not risky.
You’ll need to put the mod in the mods directory. On my PC this is at “C:\Users\Sam Garforth\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\mods”. You may need to change your settings as it may be a hidden directory.
Then just click the play button on Minecraft and enjoy they game, following DanTDM’s advice on how to play it.
Here are the mods that we’ve tried and like and which work. I’ve tried to remember the urls but I may have made a mistake somewhere, so they’re not guaranteed to be the right ones but I’m pretty sure they are:
- Furniture
- Inventory Pets
- Animal Bikes
- Secret Rooms
- Transformers
- Mob Armour
- Camping
- Pokemon / Pixelmon
- More Player Models
- Grenade
- Candy Craft
- Clay Soldiers
- Geochests
- Hoonpad
- Lucky Block
- Modular Powersuits
- Rollercoaster
- Starminer
- Sync
- Funland Map
Sam Garforth 