Bok’s Banging Butterflies adds butterflies and moths to Minecraft. This week I’ve experimented with the new variant system to add some flavour to already existing butterflies. I’ve also added a small effect that should allow observant players to spot beneficial mud puddle areas at a glance.
Minecraft Modding
Tutorials on how to create new things in Minecraft
Why Reducing Logspam Matters
Recently, a bug was submitted about Bok’s Banging Butterflies complaining that there was too much logging by the mod. This might seem unimportant at first, but efficient logging is vital to any project. You ignore bad logging at your peril.
The Fixing of a Fair Few Bugs
This week I fixed a few bugs that had made it into Bok’s Banging Butterflies. Two have been present for a while, but I was unable to reproduce or fix them. The third was a bug introduced by my recent changes to texture generation.
New Images in the Pipeline
Every time I add a new butterfly to the mod, I need to create multiple textures for them. Recently, I developed a method generating spawn egg textures so I didn’t have to do them manually.
The New Butterfly Pipeline
I use a Python script to help generate code, data, and textures for Bok’s Banging Butterflies. However, this script was starting to get unwieldy. At more than 500 lines it was getting harder to find certain sections when modifications needed to be made.
Doing Spawn Eggs Properly
Spawn eggs were almost an afterthought in Bok’s Banging Butterflies. They worked, but the experience was rough. Not all entities had spawn eggs, and most eggs looked identical. With 61 butterfly and moth species, it was almost impossible for players to know what they were spawning.
Butterfly Creative Mode Tab
One detail I’ve been struggling with while developing Bok’s Banging Butterflies is where to put the items in the Creative Inventory. While playing other mods for inspiration, I saw many create a dedicated Creative Tab just for their content. A tidy, mod-branded spot that makes everything easier to find.
Improving the Publish Script
Recently I implemented some scripts to automatically publish new versions of Bok’s Banging Butterflies to several platforms. In order to support this, I added a new step where I needed to update the version in the publish script itself.
Moving the Config Options
Modpack authors are always on the hunt for ways to optimize performance, and that means giving them the right configuration options. A recent bug report revealed I’d made those options impossible to find in Bok’s Banging Butterflies.
Fixing the Landing States
I got a couple of bug reports about butterfly movement recently. Some were stuck floating in the sky, others wouldn’t animate properly when moving. So I took some time this week to clean up the movement and landing code to make it more robust.