Modpack Permission
Contents
Can I use Galacticraft in a modpack?
Yes. Under Galacticraft's license, permission is automatically granted for modpacks, as long as you're not charging money for your modpack. There's one important condition: you have to keep the Galacticraft version in your pack reasonably up to date: see further below.
What does "as long as you're not charging money" mean? Advertisements on the download page for your modpack are OK. Offering your modpack on a website connected with a donation based server for players who want to play the pack is OK. So what is not OK? Selling the modpack, including via digital download, would not be cool. Offering it on a 'pay-to-win' server, where only donators get access to specific Galacticraft features or items needed to progress to the end of the game or fully enjoy the mod, is not OK - the exact same way that would be in breach of Mojang's EULA. (But: setting up a server to allow only donators access to cosmetic features of Galacticraft, for example the Space Race commands and the ability to design your own flag, would be OK with us.)
A modpack must not incorporate the word "Galacticraft" in its name or present itself as being an "official" Galacticraft modpack. It isn't official, unless we say so here. (There are no official Galacticraft modpacks at this time.)
You can change config settings of course, and make any specific recipe changes you need in customised packs (for example using MineTweaker). Except for that, you are not allowed to modify Galacticraft in modpacks - see License sections 28 and 37 for full details. If something needs fixing, come ask us or make a pull request on the Github.
Keeping up to date
We do not appreciate modpacks which keep on distributing old versions of Galacticraft which are many months old and have known issues, when a newer version of Galacticraft is available. There is basically no reason not to update Galacticraft in a pack, Galacticraft maintains legacy compatibility with older and newer versions of other mods (for example, it is compatible with the 1.7.2 versions of everything as well as the latest 1.7.10 versions) so - unlike many other mods - updating Galacticraft will not break anything. Also - unlike many other mods - we do not increase the minimum Forge version requirement, so a new Galacticraft will work 100% fine in an older modpack.
An example: Galacticraft 3 is 100% compatible with RF mods, and has been 100% compatible since December 2014. But early beta versions of Galacticraft 3 did not have this compatibility. Unfortunately, one modpack is still using a September 2014 version of Galacticraft: not a good idea!
Tips for modpacks
- Author credit and a link to www.micdoodle8.com would be appreciated as a thank you for the work we do in creating and maintaining the mod.
- You are advised to use the very latest version when you create your pack (not the latest 'stable' version, the actual most recent version)
- You must regularly check for Galacticraft updates, because Galacticraft gets updated a lot. Each time we do a minor version update, like 3.0.10 -> 3.0.11, is a sign that players and modpacks should also be updating. If you don't update, your players will be left behind and we cannot support long outdated versions of the mod.
- Any serious compatibility issues with other mods, please do report them to us at https://github.com/micdoodle8/Galacticraft/issues or ask your players to report them directly to us there. We will look at fixing them, the aim is for Galacticraft to be 100% compatible with all other major mods. (But we will get irritable if people report issues which are already fixed in the latest version!)
- Make sure you set the configs properly - see next section.
Configs
You will need to read all this on the wiki to set up a good config file:
Note that the Galacticraft electrical energy system is extremely powerful and compatible. It's compatible with everything (Buildcraft / EnderIO / Extra Utilities / Forestry / IC2 / Mekanism / Thermal Expansion) so it allows for cross-mod conversion of electricity which might not otherwise be possible. Due to this, it is worth taking some time to set up the energy config correctly. The default values should work in most situations, but you may want to add a small amount of lossiness so that cross-mod energy conversion is not too OP.
Troubleshooting
If you're making a modpack, or running a server with a modpack, you probably experience plenty of crashes and other issues...
Most crash reports will name GCEntityPlayerMP somewhere in the text of the crash report - example:
Player Count: 1 / 8; [GCEntityPlayerMP['radfast'/297, l='boptest1', x=-448.27, y=64.00, z=1006.55]
This does not mean that Galacticraft caused the crash. All that's happening here is that if Galacticraft is installed, the regular Minecraft player class EntityPlayerMP now has GCEntityPlayerMP in its place. This does not cause crashes. Think of it as just a name change on the vanilla class EntityPlayerMP. The crash report is simply reporting the players who are online or nearby to the chunk which is crashing, in exactly the same way that a Minecraft crash report always does. If Galacticraft is installed, all the players will be GCEntityPlayerMP. That's all.
Some crash reports do of course actually involve the player - for example if the player took damage from a mob, or a potion effect added by a mob is crashing, or something like that. Again, just because GCEntityPlayerMP is named here (or GCEntityClientPlayerMP, on a client) does not mean Galacticraft is causing the crash. Even if the stacktrace includes something like this in the middle:
at net.minecraft.entity.player.EntityPlayerMP.func_70097_a(EntityPlayerMP.java:491)
at micdoodle8.mods.galacticraft.core.entities.player.GCEntityPlayerMP.func_70097_a(GCEntityPlayerMP.java:73)
this is not a Galacticraft crash. Clue: the micdoodle8 class is mentioned in the middle of the stacktrace, not the top. In any crash report, it's always the line or two at the top of the crash report which gives you the actual cause of the crash (unless there's a Caused by: line lower down).
When testing Galacticraft in your modpacks, please do not assume that Galacticraft is unstable just because you are seeing the types of things written about above in your crash reports. Recent versions of Galacticraft (for example 3.0.12) are extremely stable and tested with a large number of other mods. Of course no mod is 100% perfect, but the Galacticraft developers react quickly to crash reports - normally producing fixes within 24 hours - so any known cause of crashes will not generally stay in Galacticraft for very long.
TL;DR: although Galacticraft 3 may have had a few compatibility issues back in August/September 2014 when it was in beta, these days it is very stable - we think you will be pleasantly surprised.