🚷 Better Than Wolves - Community Edition 🚷

This is a continuation of FlowerChild's Better than Wolves total conversion Minecraft mod. Its aim is to both recapture the feeling of that first time you played Minecraft, hiding in a dark hole on your first night with monsters all around, as well as extending gameplay by creating a deep tech tree that lets you slowly master your surroundings, as you craft windmills, kilns and crucibles and eventually reach steel production.

Better Than Wolves is trying to keep that old survival feel of versions past and therefore uses an old version of Minecraft: 1.5.2. This means that the installation is a bit different from most mods. Check out the wiki for installation instructions.

🔗 Links

💜 A word of gratitude

The Community Edition team would like to express its gratitude to all the people that have kept this community alive all these years:

FlowerChild, for making BTW
Dawnraider, for spearheading the Community Edition effort
Sargunster, for keeping the forums and wiki online all these years
Sarudak, for moderating the forums
Zhil, for organizing the extended community and creating many of the build tools for CE
Arminias, for contributing architectural upgrades such as moving to fabric
Hiracho, for contributing significant work on design, features, and bugfixes

As well as a thanks the following people who have contributed time and effort to the community edition:

yany
IssaMe
rockoutwill
ExpHP
AnaRchX
Sockthing
cocona20xx

Furthermore, thanks to the following people who have provided translations for BTW:

Quanteus: Russian
Peakstep: Simplified Chinese
Sockthing: German
slzei: Turkish

Code and/or assets have also been used from the following sources:

MCPatcher by Kahr: Public Domain

🐺 What is Better Than Wolves?

Better Than Wolves is a "total conversion". This differs from most mods that you are probably used to in that it changes many of the rules of play to provide a richer experience, rather than just adding in new stuff. What makes it special however, is that it always attempts to do so in a way that retains the original spirit of the game, perhaps even more so than the newer official releases.

It focuses both on challenging survival play, and player creativity in terms of never providing "magic block" solutions to in game problems. Instead, it provides basic tools and leaves it to the player to figure out how to use them to get the job done.

In short, Better Than Wolves is a vision of what Minecraft could have been, designed by very serious players, for other like minded individuals.

🌐 What Does Community Edition Mean?

Community Edition is the successor to FlowerChild's original mod. It is a direct continuation using FC's source code, developed by the community, and following FC's original vision for the mod. The primary focuses of CE are fixing some of the features and systems FlowerChild left incomplete when he left the mod, as well as providing bugfixes and quality of life improvements.

📝 License

Better Than Wolves and its source code are made freely available under the creative commons attribution license:

Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

A note from FlowerChild about licensing:

You are free to modify and redistribute portions of BTW and its code as you wish, but I (FlowerChild) would appreciate acknowledgment if you do so. Keep in mind however that parts of BTW may be based on modified versions of Mojang's code and assets, and it is left to anyone redistributing portions of BTW to make sure they are appropriately considering Mojang's intellectual property and licensing as well.

🗜️ How do I obtain the source code?

Note: This only applies to version 1.4.1 and below! We are working on a more available solution to versions 2.0 and above. For now, if you would like access to the source code, ask on discord and we can add you.

Download Minecraft Coder Pack (MCP) for 1.5.2
Download the source code for a specific version from the releases page
Unpack the source code in a folder
Put mcp751.zip in this folder
Run gradlew.bat (Windows) or ./gradlew (Shell)

This will take a few minutes and place the source code in the mcp/src folder.

🔔 A Note About Compatibility

Because of the extremely large scope of Better than Wolves, it is monumentally unlikely for any mods not explicitly designed for Better than Wolves to be compatible. Due to the polished and self-contained design of BTW though, I personally don't think that's a bad thing as it creates a more curated experience for the player.

However, for those looking to expand their options beyond just BTW, there is a lively community of addon creators over on discord and the forums. These addons are designed to work with BTW and enhance the experience.

Anyone wishing to create an addon for BTW is free to do so. BTW CE has a built in addon API which will continue to be expanded in future releases. It is also built upon the legacy fabric loader, which additionally allows for mixins and access transformers. Note that this does not include the fabric API, so other fabric mods are not compatible.

💃 FlowerChild's Final Message to the Community

With today being the 10th anniversary of the first release of Better Than Wolves, and with the release of the source code, I feel it is a good time for me to say goodbye to the mod and its fans.

It's been a wild ride this last decade with plenty of highs and lows along the way, but it's clear to me this is a chapter I wish to bring to a close in my life. If I ask anything of the community in leaving, it is that you let me do so in peace and let me make a clean break with the mod and FlowerChild. After all this time, effort, and conflict, it is not something I wish to carry any longer and I hope you all will respect that.