From how I remember Minecraft becoming the global phenomena, modding was always a core experience and people modded Minecraft way before even the intial 2011 release.
But I recently looked at Curseforge and discovered that 30% of all downloads ever for Minecraft happened in 2025 alone! (30 Billion downloads) And 25% of all mods on curseforge were also launched this past year 60 000.
Any Idea why modding exploded this last year?
by Soanfriwack
14 Comments
That’s very surprising honestly. I thought CurseForge would’ve fallen behind due to the departure of Sodium.
ppl have been playing the same game for like what 15 years now? The updates fit the game but don’t really add much so its not suprising ppl wanna try something new
more previously vanilla only youtubers branching into modded, modding becoming a little more accessible, and kids getting old enough to figure out how to play modded; easy
I still mod the (semi)old-fashioned way, by downloading mod files and packaging it as a zip for distribution over Technic Launcher. That generates 1 download per mod for me and my friends. However, every time you download a modpack or update it using the Curseforge Launcher or other such assembler, that gives you a new download for every mod. Minecraft is continually growing, and if we imagine that people keep downloading new modpacks, the latest year should always have the most downloads. I’m not sure why it’s fully 30%, but I imagine multiple factors conspire to make the growth exponential-like.
I don’t think anything happened like popularity wise, I personally think its just that mods tend to be smaller these days but have much more of them, basically instead of making 1 giant mod that has everything its split into 5 smaller ones, with each being more specific in its content, that means the overall quantity of mods is higher, therefore more downloads for practically same outcome.
Basically, an average modpack (which most people download these days) didn’t change in popularity or its content size, but it like tippled in mod count, that leads to triple downloads even tho everything is the same. Throw into that Fabric API is a mod you always download when playing with fabric so it also boosts the stats as it is downloaded anytime someone installs fabric.
Children growing up and getting computers to mod mc?
Minecraft movie making people remember Minecraft exists.
Thats it.
people have more courage to download mods and now it’s stupidly easier to install even find mods.
Back in the old days my sister and I were trying to find what to delete in Minecraft. jar to not break the game
of course YouTube had a lot of help too
downloads are well beyond the total human population of Earth what the fuck
Look into mod count for newer packs, especially the popular ones like ATM, and compare it to older packs. Now consider that the modded community generally only grows over time. Once people start to play modded, they rarely go back to vanilla. Big youtubers are also playing modded, and GTNH came more into the mainstream due to youtube popularity. The people who version chase had a lot of updating going on in the last year due to mojang pushing like 10 minor updates in one year, and every mod updated is a download.
Most of mods are hobbies. Since AI becoming more and more accessible and helps with automated things like code review and automated supervised updates (aka agentic mode) ppl can deliver their hobbies faster. Or at least finish them faster.
We are in a new age of mod convenience as well as mod quality, I would say. You can tell because whenever someone is like “To mod you need to add a hundred different mods MANUALLY and they ALL crash the game and there’s NO HINT as to what did it” everyone is immediately pointing out that they’re utterly out of touch in every department
6 letters: Create
My vote is on vibe coding