I started learning about creating a Minecraft mod today, using this excellent tutorial (thanks @0x17h and @adudney).

Background: Minecraft is a very popular world-building game. They announced last November that they will release an API, but they have a friendly attitude toward users who have reverse-engineered how to create “mods” (extensions to the game and changes to the behavior of objects in the world). Minecraft Forge is the de-facto standard API toolkit for making mods.

We found that the easiest way to run a server is to run it locally on an old MacBook, allowing external connections to connect to a noip domain and tunnel into our home network.

Prerequisites:We’re running Mac OSX SnowLeopard. We need Java and the JDK, 1.6 or better.

Check that java is installed

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_37"

Check that the JDK is installed

$ javac -version
javac 1.6.0_37

We installed 64-bit version of Eclipse.

Other than those platform-specific details that I had to look up, we had no problem following the basic modding tutorial. The mod doesn’t do anything yet, but we can run minecraft and see it load: