Created by Swedish programmer Markus Alexej Persson (aka Notch) and officially released in November 2011 after two and a half years of development, Minecraft is a sandbox construction game that has swiftly captivated the online gaming community and already boasts millions of users worldwide. Minecraft is all about construction; the game environment consists of blocks which correspond to various naturally occurring materials, such as stone, tree trunks, water and so on, all set in a fixed grid pattern. The players can roam freely in this virtual environment and can move those materials around, thereby building their own constructions.
Minecraft Mods
But what truly distinguishes Minecraft and greatly adds to its replay value, is that it is a very open-ended game with an unlimited potential for customisation through various user-created modifications. A lot of these mods add new content and options to the game, whilst others seek to simplify gameplay or merge components from another game into the Minecraft experience. There are already hundreds of mods available, and you might understandably be wondering which ones to try first. Well, there could be no better choice than to start with the best minecraft mods currently available. And here, we shall present what we believe to be the two best Minecraft mods according to popularity.
Magic Wands Mod for Minecraft 1.0.0
The Magic Wands mod was created to provide Minecraft with pretty much the only thing it did not already have: magic. The Magic Wands mode is very useful, as it makes basic Minecraft actions, such as building, destroying or simply exploring the Minecraft world a lot easier. Here’s what magic wands can do and what makes it one of the best Minecraft mods:
- Building wand
- Builds houses, lines and cubes
- Fills cavities with water or lava
- Places torches smartly
- Fills caves with stone
- Mining wand
- Mines blocks
- Extracts ores from the surface
- Mines only the resources you select (wood, dirt and so on)
- Destructive wand
- Eliminates stuff
- Can selectively destroy Minecraft flora
- Leaves ores unscathed
How to craft the magic wands
To craft your magic wand, you need to use the proper combination of materials from your inventory. Here’s how to access the regular wands:
- Building wand: Plank-gold-plank
- Destructive wand: plank-iron-plank
- Mining wand: plank-diamonds-plank
For the reinforced wands, you need to substitute planks with obsidian.
How to use the magic wands
Magic wands are used in a cuboid formation on Minecraft’s grid. This means that you have to mark the two outermost corners of the area where you will be using them. On the second point of your selection you should see a prompt to “hold X,C,V”. These are your magic wand’s hotkeys, and the table below illustrates how exactly they work.
Magic Wands Mod Features
Building Magic Wand
Hotkey
Constructs
Durability
Range
Ideal for large scale excavations, such as the digging of holes down to the bedrock level.
Caution: Do not stand on blocks that you will be removing, or you might end up falling.
Download and installation instructions for Magic Wands Mod version 1.0.0
- Take a backup copy of your minecraft.jar file. To find its location, go to the Windows Start Menu, select ‘Run’ (if this option is not available, you may have to enable it from your start menu options in later versions of Windows), enter /%appdata%/.minecraft/bin and click OK.
- Download and install ModLoader, following its instructions, and then test whether Minecraft works properly.
- If you are greeted with a black screen, it means you made a mistake in the installation of Modloader or forgot to remove the Meta-inf folder
- If Minecraft works and does not give you a black screen, a new folder named “mods” should be generated. If not, create one with this name on your own.
- Drag and drop the Magicwands zip file into the folder described in step 3.
- Play and have fun. Magic Wands is difficult to explain in words, but opens up a whole new world of possibilities in your Minecraft experience. Enjoy!
Wall, City and Road Generator
Besides the Magic Wands mod, this one also deserves a mention as one of the best Minecraft mods as well. Wall, City and Road Generator is a mod for Minecraft version 1.0.0, and can help you create new fixtures in your Minecraft environment in various distinct styles such as:
- Mossy cobblestone style: these cities resemble castles in a big forest area
- Sandstone style: these cities look like castles in the middle of sandy terrain, with some trees and big sandy towers.
- Cobblestone style: Temple-like buildings with elements of glass along with some trees and a lot of brown rooftops are the dominant features of this style.
- Ruined Sandstone: This one is self-explanatory…a city in ruins built using Minecraft material! Buildings are made of sandstone and limestone and are quite dense, while plants are scarce.
What’s new
The most recent version of City, Wall and Road Generator is able to generate interior room floors and dungeons and ensures that cities no longer overlap with each other. It also adds new buildings and reduces the cities’ spawn frequency. Lastly, it allows you to save city locations between each Minecraft session.
Installation instructions
- Download mod zip file and open it.
- Go to Start menu, select “run” and enter “%appdata%>.minecraft” (without the quotes). In the folder that shows up, you should find a “resources” folder. Extract the content of the “resources” folder of the zipped file that you downloaded over the “resources” folder that you just located in your computer (effectively, you are merging their content).
- Navigate to the ‘bins’ folder.
- Open minecraft.jar with WinRar, 7Zip or a similar utility.
- Drag and drop all the contents inside class_file into the open minecraft.jar and let your compression utility (WinRar etc) modify the archive.
These are probably the two best Minecraft mods. We base this conclusion not only on our own opinion; in fact, we asked a lot of Minecraft players to pick the best Minecraft mods, and these two gathered a lot of votes. So, whether you are just now beginning to discover the world of Minecraft mods, or you are already very experienced with them, you should definitely give the best minecraft mods a try.
PS: We will try to gradually post all the popular minecraft mods in order to give you new ideas and fun!