Modpack Permission

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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 are two basic conditions to bear in mind:

1) You have to keep the Galacticraft version in your pack up to date - see next section.

2) You don't have to provide a link to our download site (obviously your modpack will contain the .jar files already). But you do have to provide a link to this Wiki, so that players looking for help come to the right place!

Currently (start of 2018) Galacticraft is not available to download on CurseForge. If your modpack is on CurseForge, we therefore allow you to include a copy of Galacticraft's three .jar files in your own modpack's download files. See Space Astronomy mod for an example. CurseForge call this a "third party mod". If CurseForge ask you about permissions for this, please direct them here. (Please note that if we decide to join CurseForge in future then this permission will change, and from that time you will need to include our mod as a CurseForge dependency, like most other mods.)


Non-commercial license

What does "as long as you're not charging money for your modpack" mean? Advertisements on the download page for your modpack are OK as long as you're genuinely offering a modpack (meaning a pack of mods, and not only a Galacticraft download). Offering your modpack on Curse is also OK. Offering your modpack on a website connected with a donation-based server - for players who want to play the pack on a server - is also totally OK with us.

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! Conversion or 'porting' to a different gaming platform is also not covered by this modpack permission.

(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 or the ability to rename your own space station, would be OK with us. Server owners can probably figure out how to do this using command permissions... we've designed Galacticraft commands to allow these things.)

Other important conditions

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, and you can 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

You are supposed to use the Latest build of Galacticraft in modpacks. Not the Promoted build. The Latest build should usually be more stable than the Promoted build, because it will have the latest bugfixes!

This means it is not smart to pick an older or "stable" version of Galacticraft for your pack, this will not help anyone! If in doubt whether the latest version is stable enough for your pack, please ask the developers, we are happy to help modpack creators.

The Whats_New page gives a handy summary of recent changes but doesn't list every bugfix. The detailed changelog lists all changes.

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 modpack. Galacticraft always maintains legacy compatibility with saves made using older versions of the mod.

Therefore you need to treat your pack as a living thing, and keep it updated. If your modpack has become stale or you are no longer interested in maintaining it, please take it down from servers or mark it as non-current.

Galacticraft takes care to maintain legacy compatibility with older versions of other mods. For example we still provide support for the Buildcraft MJ energy system in case there are modpacks out there with Buildcraft 6.0 who want the latest Galacticraft. (Another example is in our Minecraft 1.10.2 version, all our fluid pipes, tanks and canisters are compatible with both the old and the new ways of handling fluids in Forge, so we should work with every other mod.) So - unlike some mods! - updating Galacticraft to the latest will not break anything. You should be able to safely update Galacticraft in your modpack without re-checking compatibility with every other mod in the pack. (And we also do not increase the minimum Forge version requirement.)

We reserve the right to take action against modpacks distributing Galacticraft versions which are more than 2 months out of date (unless there is a very good reason for it - for example, modpacks for an older Minecraft version).


Add-ons

Galacticraft add-ons (sub-mods) - such as AmunRa More Planets, GalaxySpace or Extra Planets - are an exception to this principle that updating Galacticraft doesn't break anything. These add-ons have to have versions roughly matching GalacticraftCore. That's because these add-ons interact very closely with Galacticraft Core code.

If you are planning to use Galacticraft add-ons in a modpack, you should check their Galacticraft version requirements carefully. The add-ons work with specific versions of Galacticraft. If you update Galacticraft, it's fairly likely you'll need to update the add-ons at the same time.

The add-on developers usually make it very clear which versions of GalacticraftCore their add-on requires. GalacticraftCore versions with similar numbers should also often be OK - but not always! If in doubt, please contact the add-on developer.


Tips for modpacks

  • Please always provide a link to this wiki in your modlist, so that players looking for help know where to go.
  • 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. The main authors are micdoodle8 and radfast. A larger list of contributors is here
  • You are advised to use the very latest version when you create your pack (not the latest 'promoted' version, the actual most recent version)
  • You must regularly check for Galacticraft updates, because Galacticraft gets updated a lot. If you don't update, your players will be left behind. We cannot support long outdated versions of the mod.
  • Obviously we can only fix issues which are reported to us. If your modpack has its own issue tracker, we are not reading it. So if Galacticraft issues get reported to a modpack, then someone - either the modpack creator, or the players - will also need to report the issues directly to us, otherwise the issues will just sit there forever not being fixed...
  • Only report issues which are Galacticraft issues, of course. Crash reports which somewhere in the middle one brief reference to GCEntityPlayerMP are not normally Galacticraft issues - see Troubleshooting below.
  • Make sure you set the configs properly - see next section.
  • If your players are not English-speaking, you might want to help us by checking the Galacticraft translation into your language is completely up to date, before you release your pack. You can view the language files here and here. You can edit the language files directly by forking on Github to create a branch, editing in your branch and then making a Pull Request.

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. It's also the highest performance energy system in Minecraft, meaning, huge builds with many generators and wires will not place too heavy a load on servers. Due to this, it is worth taking some time to set up the Galacticraft 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.

If your modpack has more than one way of converting energy between RF, IC2, Mekanism and Galacticraft, then it's possible that the other way uses different conversion factors, so keep an eye on that - it's best to set up all energy conversion configs the same. (If energy conversion factors are different then it might be possible to set up an infinite power loop where energy passes from mod A, to mod B, to mod C, and back to mod A.) If you are not sure which energy conversion factors to use, we suggest you use our conversion values and set up any other energy-converting mods to match these exactly. Our default conversion values are correct. If that still doesn't resolve a problem, then set Galacticraft to add some % loss when converting between mods, that can prevent a loop.

Troubleshooting

If you're making a modpack, or running a server with a modpack, you probably experience plenty of crashes and other issues...

Some 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 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). Further reading and examples.

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 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 - so any known cause of crashes will not generally stay in Galacticraft for very long.