A Modded Minecraft Wiki. By modders, for modders.
Sinytra is proud to present our latest project, The Modded Minecraft Wiki - a common place for everyone to host and share documentation of their mods.
We're hoping it will become a favorable choice for writing mod documentation over existings options (which both devs and users may find uneasy to use).
Motivation
Outdated information
Over the years, we've seen the rise and fall of several modding related wikis. Most of them were hosted using some form of dedicated wiki software and relied on user contributions to stay up-to-date.
However, as time passed, user contributions decreased and existing information couldn't be used reliably anymore. In addition, due to the lack of version branches in wiki software, the latest information is displayed without any kind of hint informing the user that may not be applicable to the current version of the mod anymore.
Lack of common sources
If you were to look up a block from an arbitrary mod that has received several reworks over time, you can bet there'd be several outdated and confusing results.
To demonstate, I tried searching for "Thermal Expansion Pulverizer" and here's the results I got in order, along with the referenced mc version:
- Pulverizer - Team CoFH, 1.12.2
- Pulverizer - Feed the Beast Wiki, pre-1.6, not the official FTB wiki
- Pulverizer (Thermal Expansion 5) - Official Feed The Beast Wiki, 1.12.2, the official FTB wiki
- Pulverizer - Feed the Beast Wiki, pre-1.6, not the official FTB wiki
It's clear that not only is it difficult to determine which one of these links contains accurace, up-to-date or official information, the fact that there are at least 3 fandom pages called "The Feed the Beast Wiki" doesn't help the situation either.
Present options
In the present, there are several popular ways of documenting mods (or any software in general). Howver, they all come with their drawbacks, many of which are critical for modding specifically. Let's take a look:
- Missing versioning
- Missing localization
- Users cannot contribute
- No custom Minecraft elements
❌ Fandom - no
- Missing versioning
- Hard to navigate
- Requires hosting, high maintenance cost
⚠️ Static documentation websites (Docusaurus, Nextra, Vitepress)
- No custom Minecraft elements
- Learning curve
All of these come with great disadvantages, not to mention the time investment in website maintenance.
In addition, traditional wiki software was not made with Minecraft mods in mind. Modding is a kinda specific area where we need to pay attention to additional factors when writing or looking up documentation, such as Minecraft versions.
Localization also plays a big role, and while many of the large wiki websites are left untranslated, there's a large community of people in modding who help with translating mods into popular languages and would certainly love to help out with these mods as well.
About in-game docs
In-game documentation mods, such as Patchouli or Lavender, are great tools that can make useful guidebooks or progress trackers, and they're a huge plus for players!
However, there are certain use cases where a web wiki can be more appropriate. Such in-game documentation tends to be kept short and concise for simplicity, and accessing it requires you to be running the game (I mean, makes sense, right?). If you're a modpack developer or modder and you need to look up detailed information about a mod's block or item, it's probably faster and easier to open the browser than launching an entire modpack. It's exactly in these use cases that online wikis come in handy. We can go beyond the limits of guidebooks and provide an entire knowledge base filled with detailed information.
Our approach
The Modded Minecraft Wiki is built to suit the very needs of Minecraft modders and players alike. It comes with intuitive navigation, a clean user interface, mod browser and features for authors to make writing documentation a piece of cake. These include versioning, localization, custom components (recipes, assets, etc.), gradle integration, project management and more.
- 🌐 Localization: Translate your docs into world languages
- 🚹 Accessible: Intuitive and responsive user interface
- 🤝 Open: Let your users contribute without any programming knowledge necessary
- 💸 Free: Hosting docs on our website is completely free of charge!
- 🚧 Versioning (soon™): Support multiple versions of your mod at once
"Centralized"-ish
Unlike traditional wikis, the Modded Minecraft Wiki does not store any information itself and uses a database merely to keep track of documentation sources. Instead, documentation is sources from mods' GitHub repositories (public or private) and rendered by the website using an enhanced Markdown format.
While the wiki itself is meant to be a common place to find documentation for mods, the information itself comes from various places (currently from GitHub repos). Thanks to this, you can be certain all data remains in your hands, and you are in full control of what is shown on the website or who can contribute to your docs (via Pull Requests).
Developers
We've done our best to ensure writing and maintaining documentation is as easy as possible for both developers and community contributors.
Projects can be registered to the wiki by mod developers and repository maintainers in just a few easy steps:
- Host your mod's source code on GitHub (both public and private repos work!)
- Publish your mod on Modrinth or CurseForge*
- Setup documentation directory using our Developer guide and push it to the GitHub repo. Feel free to make use of the many useful components we include in our Markdown parser.
- Register your mod to the Wiki (see the Publishing page for more details)
- Share your docs with the world!
*Please note that as of the public release of the Wiki, only projects hosted on Modrinth can be registered, with CurseForge support coming in the following weeks. This is due to API access limitations by CurseForge.
Roadmap
There are a lot more exciting features coming to the Wiki in the near future. Here's a few highlights we think you may be interested in:
- 🚧 Versioning support - Use branches in your documentation!
- 🚧 Wiki UI localization via Crowdin
- 🚧 Community-sourced documentation
- 🚧 More components for authors (please make sure to submit suggestions!)
- 🚧 CurseForge project metadata sources - for CurseForge exclusive projects
- ❓ ...and more fancy features!
Ads
I'd like to give a heads-up in advance as not to cause an unpleasant surprise later on - in the future, we will be showing ads on the website, which is a necessity to keep it running. Their extent and provider are yet to be determinated, but we'll do our best to find a solution that respects users' privacy and isn't overly intrusive.
We're also very open to suggestions and feedback on this topic, so feel free to let us know what you think on our Discord or GitHub Discussions.
Closing thoughts
For a long time, finding a hosting platform for mod documentation was a troubling task with seemingly no favorable choices.
Our goal with the Modded Minecraft Wiki is to change this status quo and provide a new place for modders to host their mods' documenatation at ease, without having to worry about ever losing their information or locking them into a proprietary format.
On top of that, hosting documentation is made available to every mod author free of charge, with first-class mod dev Gradle integration available.
We're hoping you'll find the new wiki useful, no matter whether you're a developer or player.
If you have any additional questions about hosting docs or would like to suggest improvements, please make sure to let us know!