Block out some time in your schedule for these
Be honest – you haven’t played Minecraft in years, have you? After hitting the bottom of the game’s rather shallow tech tree, there’s only so much fun to be had building things out of blocks.
But there’s another way to enjoy Minecraft – with mods. Mods that’ll let you build up enormous factories in the sky, survive a shuttle crash on an alien world, become a powerful sorcerer, live with nature in the tranquility of the forest, or all of the above at the same time.
Most articles promising the best Minecraft mods will give you an endless list of incompatible downloads to grab off questionable websites, but we’re going to be doing things a different way. We’ll give you a selection of five custom-curated packs of mods that work together to deliver a particular experience.
All the modpacks below come with a video or in-game guide that’ll teach you how things work – though you may at some points have to resort to Google to figure a few things out.
To download them, all you need is the Twitch Desktop App , which will guide you through the installation process. Just click the Minecraft tab, hit ‘Browse All Modpacks’, and use the search box to find each one.
Oh, and one hardware note – you’ll need the desktop version of Minecraft to run these, and a reasonably capable computer. Minecraft is not exactly what you’d call a well-optimized game, and the extra load that mods place on it means lower-end laptops might struggle with some of the bigger packs.
Now, let’s get onto that list…
The best place to start with modded Minecraft is with a guide, and YouTuber Direwolf20 is the best guide around. He’s curated his own pack of mods, with a few custom configurations to make them work nicely together, and records a YouTube series where he plays through them in turn.
The experience leans more towards technology and automation than exploration and survival. But watching the YouTube videos between play sessions, and roughly keeping up with his progress, allows newcomers to modded Minecraft to quickly get a handle on even the most complicated mods, and understand where they fit into the tech tree.
