As someone who’s first exposure to Minecraft was on the PlayStation 4, I’ve always felt better with the Bedrock edition of Minecraft than the Java. The increase in responsiveness is not even close when comparing C++ to Java. Bedrock edition however does not support mods, instead it has addons. Addons are basically mods that only change certain parts of the games, what parts they can change is chosen by what ever Microsoft is currently supporting. Addons are mostly JSON files, but also include special texture png’s and audio ogg’s. The framework’s most commonly used are Bridge for JSON editing and project management and an image editor, for which I just use MS Paint because the images are often only 16×16 pixels. The first addon I made was “BetterBoneMares”. It was mostly a practice piece, but I did eventually polish it up to the point where it became presentable. The problem is was meant to solve was that bone mares or skeleton horses exist in the game, but they are super difficult to obtain. The thing is, if you go out of your way to obtain one, they suck. They are a terrible steed. I just added some features from normal horses, such as wearing armor and breedability (though with rotten flesh only), and buffed their stats so they were worth the extra effort to obtain and reinforced the fantasy of capturing and riding an undead steed.
Another addon was developed out of a more social nature. I noticed that one of my friend groups had a server and played together on it a lot, but they were causal players and often just ended up sitting around and talking to each other by the end of most sessions. One time, one of them said, “Man, I wish we could drink beer in this game.” So I decided to make an addon titled, “adultBeverages”, which added various drinks like beer, vodka, coffee, and the original Four Loko, all with unique effects, original models, and often a side effect of in-game nausea I got from the nether portal entrance effect.
I also began work on a Minecraft football addon, which created an in-game football item/entity which could be thrown and enter a players inventory upon collision. Unfortunately, this was not able to be completed due to difficulty of the whole, enter inventory upon collision part. It’s very difficult to do that in a JSON. I also created a few vanilla+ style addons which added certain player requested crafting recipes and a few unique items that added depth to gameplay.
THE BEN CONNOLLY 