Writing this now, I realized that this marks the first quarter of the 21st century, and I think that's pretty cool. Is this something else other people noticed as well? It didn't seem like to me that this was at the top of anyone's mind with all the doom and gloom of current world events, and I don't blame them, what a year huh? But this blog isn't the place for that! Instead, I want to share with you my best and worst moments of yesteryear.
The year of 2024 left me with mixed feelings as it contained some of the best moments in my life, and good contenders for some of the worst. If you kept in touch with me, or even met me last year, you know exactly what was my highlight of last year—Minecraft modding.
I started modding Minecraft 4 years ago, and my first project was Siltbox, a vanilla overhaul mod where I held strong design opinions which were rooted in Mojang's own design philosophy. I invested a lot of time and effort into this ambitious mod, and I developed a lot of interesting ideas. But like most projects my focus shifted away and I ended up shelving it for a long time.
Fast forward to early 2024, my friend Mudkip was developing a Minecraft modpack designed around Cobblemon with a splash of Create. He was having problems with motivation, so I half jokingly told him that if he reminds me to work on Siltbox, I'll remind him to work on his modpack. I would later come to really appreciate him taking me up on that deal.
Given how long ago it was Minecraft has seen several major updates, and at the time the latest version was 1.20, while Siltbox was based on the 1.16 version. I initially wanted to stick to the old version and fully develop the mod before I ported it over to minimize maintenance work, but something changed my mind when I saw what the modern modding ecosystem was like. For the first time in Minecraft's modding history, vanilla friendly mods gained mainstream popularity with heavy hitters like Create and Farmer's Delight. I was elated!
The thing about Siltbox is that it was more than a content mod, it was functionally a modpack. Its scope was broader than any large mod, and it had bug fixes and quality of life features; it aimed to be a complete and cohesive experience. This was because at the time I didn't like most mods, and I especially hated most modpacks for being poorly designed and highly vanilla unfriendly. I was going to make all the mods for my modpack myself, and keeping it as a single monolithic mod was easiest for me to develop.
But there was now a large and growing offering of quality vanilla friendly mods that I am actually excited about playing with, mods which I would want to be part of the Siltbox experience. My friends had also urged me for years to split up Siltbox so they could pick the features they want, so I made the decision to take Siltbox's best features and develop them as separate mods for the latest version of Minecraft.
My first mod was Chai's Inventory Sorter, which was a direct port of the inventory sorter feature from Siltbox, polished up and served with a brand new configuration screen. This would become one of my most popular mods for a few months until the release of Particular, which would take off like a rocket and opened up a lot of exciting opportunities for me, one of which was becoming friends with Laynce, one of the few Minecraft content creators I watch and someone I look up to!
I would go on to release 15 mods and accumulate 930k downloads on Modrinth by the end of the year, and those mods would bring in a lot of new people and friends, growing my Discord server from a humble 30 members to over 10 times that! :0
In June I participated in ModFest, a game jam for Minecraft mods. My submission was the Wowozela, which ended up being a popular mod on the showcase server and it won the 2nd funniest mod award! I had a lot of fun participating in that event and I invited a bunch of my friends to play on the showcase server with me. I did have some pet peeves with one of their base mods, so I made a bunch of contributions, and it seems one of the ModFest staff noticed my enthusiasm and invited me to join their team! I felt honored to be part of something so cool, and I was eager to improve the event as a team member.
October would welcome a second ModFest, where I casually flexed by developing and submitting 5 whole mods, three of which were in the top 5 of their respective best theme categories. My primary submission FBombs won 3 awards: 2nd best throwbacks-themed, 4th best booth, and 4th funniest. I also designed an 8-part quest line in collaboration with several other booths, and the reward was that you could activate a timed atomic bomb that would blow up my FBombs booth, and vaporize all guests within range in nuclear fire :3
Probably the most exciting thing has to be something that hasn't been fully realized yet. When I was developing my inventory sorter mod, I wanted to use a config library to provide the config screen, and I ended up going with owo-lib. I soon realized that it was pretty limited in its capabilities, so I put in some suggestions for the developer and even offered to submit code contributions, but the lead developer bizarrely turned them all down.
Undeterred, I created Sushi Bar as a library mod to extend owo-lib and Lavender with common sense features it was missing. This method would prove to be unsustainable though. Those mods gave me a lot of headaches because they were difficult to extend and introduced some baffling bugs.
After reaching a boiling point I threw in the towel and decided to turn Sushi Bar into its own fully fledged config screen mod! Having worked with Minecraft's GUI code before, I decided to skip that dumpster fire and roll my own UI component system to build the config screen on top of. As I shared my progress in the ModFest server though, it started garnering a lot of attention from regulars who were interested in both the novel UI component system I was developing, and the accompanying config screen. They commented on how clean the code looked, and how elegant the whole system was—it seems I was onto something really good here!
I had to temporarily shelve this for ModFest 1.21, so I wasn't able to release it last year, but I can tell it's going to make a big splash when it releases and seriously challenge the major config library mods.
The runner up for the best thing I've done in 2024 was visiting Pax East with my friends again! It's a video & tabletop gaming convention, and it's such a blast going the full 4 days every year. I'm excited to go again next year :3
Rollercoasters have their peaks and valleys, and 2024 was no exception. The biggest valley for me is the (still ongoing) "healthy" diet that my mom has been forcing on my family. Now, I'm no stranger to eating healthy, and you can do it in a way that it is delicious as heck, but whatever my mom found this time seems to claim that every single normal ingredient and proven cooking method to cook delicious meals is "bad". Here is a non-exhaustive list so you can be just as confused as I am.
"Ordinary potatoes" you wonder? Yes, normal potatoes of the russet, yukon gold, etc. kind aren't good enough for my mom. She went out of her way to find strange sweet potato varieties that just taste bad, especially after being boiled with no salt. And I normally love sweet potato fries! Speaking of fries, we got a french fry cutter which would be really cool, but my mom only bakes them with no salt, which means she isn't making fries but baked potatoes posing as fries :/
Now, I love a good fish dish, but my mom does absolutely everything to make it taste bland and watery—baked in the oven with zero butter or spices. Please for the love of god don't bake a fish unless you know what you're doing, instead pan fry it in some butter and drizzle with a bit of lemon juice to make yourself a delicious $5 meal. One time, my mom made a vegetable soup so repulsive that even she herself agreed it was bad. She's has been keeping this diet up for over 6 months now and I constantly crave eating normal food… 
Would you believe me if I said the second worst thing that happened to me this year was a trip to Aruba? Vacations are supposed to be relaxing and carefree, but that was far from the experience I had. Everything in Aruba is insanely expensive, so my family was scrounging by on cheap groceries and assembling hodgepodge meals in our kitchenless motel room, and every day I was dragged out into the blasting heat and left exhausted and sweaty each day. I didn't have fun most of the time, and I felt like I needed a vacation from that "vacation" :(
The one thing I really enjoyed about the trip was going scuba diving for the first time, it was so cool staying underwater for a long period of time and observing all the sea life around us. We got to see sea turtles gnawing away on some sea grass, a prickly sea urchin, and even a moray eel hiding under a rock!
New Year's resolutions are dumb and CGP Grey argues this excellently in his video about having themed years. I wholeheartedly recommend you watch his video as it prefaces what I will be talking about in a moment.
My theme for this year is the Year of Structure.
For many months now, I felt like I haven't been in control of my life, and I've let a lot of things stagnate. I drew less last year than the year before, I wrote nothing in my journal, I only released a single blog post, and I made no progress on Cascadia. It's honestly a miracle I was able to gather enough focus for even just Minecraft modding. High school, college, and work used to provide me with structure and schedules, but without them I've become aimless. I haven't learned how to manage my time on my own.
And I want to take back control.
With the theme of structure, it'll provide me with the mental framework to determine the kinds of decisions I should make to bring back structure to my life. This blog post is one of those decisions. Here's hoping it won't be the last one ^_^
