Version Wars

Background

The version wars were a period of indecision and conflict over which set of features offered by different Minecraft versions was necessary, and it stretched on for nearly a decade before they were finally resolved permanently in early 2022.

October 25, 2013: Minecraft 1.7.2

The spark that would ignite the version wars was actually lit nearly a year before they started. The Nosiphus server's world had been generated as Sean's client world on February 24, 2013, when the current version of Minecraft was version 1.4.7. The seed for this map would be utilized when the server itself started on June 24, 2013. This was of no problem during this era, as both 1.5 and 1.6 continued to use the same world generator as 1.4 did. 1.7, however, which launched on October 25, 2013 as 1.7.2, introduced an entirely new world generator.

1.7, however, had some big changes under the hood, and as such, it took the Forge development team nearly two months to start getting barely usable alpha builds out for the new release, and in early 2014, Mojang would release a further few updates for 1.7 that would eventually leave the final version as 1.7.10. Since we were using mods, we couldn't update until those mods were available on the new version, and accordingly, we just continued to use 1.6.4 throughout the summer of 2014.

August 2014: The Conflict Begins

Our first 1.7.10 modded server was set up in late July 2014, but these were test servers as things were still incredibly unstable on 1.7 at this time. However, this status would change by mid-August, as after we briefly used the mansion world, we set up our first, long-term 1.7.10 server that lasted into November.

Instead of utilizing the vanilla world generation, however, we used a mod called ted80's Better World Generation. This mod restored the terrain generation that had been present in Minecraft versions before Beta 1.8. So many great new mods had been released on 1.7.10 that it was starting to make 1.6.4 look dated by comparison, but the older version still retained its mod availability advantages into early 2015.

November 2014: The First Return to 1.6.4

After three months on the Beta-generated 1.7 server, the fact that Calclavia's set of mods, which included Resonant Induction and ICBM, still hadn't been updated had annoyed us to the point where we returned to the mansion world we'd been using from March to August. While I did bring some of the 1.7 mods that had 1.6 releases into the older pack, by-in-large the mod list didn't change much. We remained on 1.6.4 throughout early 2015, and didn't attempt another upgrade to 1.7 until the following August. This next upgrade attempt would set off a long period of swapping between versions.

August 2015: Another Upgrade to 1.7

NosPack's accidental deletion in February 2015 from Technic led us to create a new modpack, called Telkit, in April. This modpack was named as it attempted to be a blend between two older modpacks, Tekkit Classic and Voltz. Resonant Induction's absence on 1.7 had given 1.6 a clear advantage, but a new mod rose in popularity that we couldn't ignore: ProjectE. With Equivalent Exchange 2 now available on a newer version of Minecraft, it wasn't easy to just stick to the older version anymore.