So, Minecraft.

[kandrathe]

In Single Player, I used a cool mod called Toggle Block. It allows you to better create automated farms. With the flip of a switch water would flow onto my farm washing the wheat and seeds to the collection point. With the press of a button, the Toggle Blocks would till and replant the ground.

My son and I are playing together on a server I created on my PC. One of my first rules is that we play with no mods. There is no way that I can use that Toggle Blocks mod. Thanks anyways.

That's one of the reasons I never got into Minecraft; my sons love to download Mods and experiment with the game, but I feel that diminishes the actual play experience; this from my own experience with Diablo 1. Having said that, there are also quite a few good total conversion Mods (i.e. The Dark is to D1, Median XL is to D2) I've seen my sons play such as Adventure craft. I also wanted to comment that some small Mods can really enhance the flavor of the game, like texture pack Mods (the flashlight Mod for Doom 3, Trent Reznor gun sound for Doom 3, etc.). Anyways, all in all, I'm in agreement with you that Mods can diminish the fun, but they can also add to it if used properly, all of which I suppose is irrelevant because I don't play Minecraft .

In general, I agree. Most of the good ones are balanced such that in order to construct the OMGMegaCoolItem, you need to have mined a sufficient amount of ore only accessible by someone whose been to either the nether, or below level 19. The ultimately well balanced mod is called "Better than wolves", which creates an integrated construction path requiring end game prerequisites, and adds additional items to acquire such as farming hemp to make ropes. I also found Industrialcraft, Buildcraft and Equivalent Exchange pretty well balanced.

The requirement for toggle blocks of any size would be quantities of gold or iron. Another utility one I like in this vein is wireless redstone. I like having complicated circuits, but I hate spending hours figuring out how to get three or four wires to not intersect.

One way to handle it is to not install the mod on a world until you've gotten to the end. For single player I installed "Portable Minecraft", so we can have multiple versions of minecraft.jar somewhere other than appdata. One of them is always vanilla. This way, when the boys clamour for "Halloween Mod" I can accomodate without compromising every other world in progress.