Totem of Mods: Loader

Totem of Mods

Totem of Mods runs mods built for older Minecraft versions on a new one.

Drop a Minecraft 1.20.1 Forge mod jar into your mods folder next to Totem. Totem reads it while the game starts, translates its code to today's Minecraft, gives it the Forge API it expects, and loads it, items, blocks, entities, models, recipes, config files, even the mod's own Mixins. There is no extra folder to manage and no patched version of the mod to find: the original jar, as the author released it.

Beta. This is an honest beta, not a finished mod. A lot works, see below, and a lot does not yet. Totem tells you which is which instead of guessing or crashing.

What you need

• Minecraft 26.3, Fabric Loader 0.19.5+, Java 25
• Fabric API
• CodxLib — a required dependency, install the 26.3 Fabric file too
• Disk space: Totem keeps its working copies in a totem/ folder in your instance. About 150 MB of that is the copy of 1.20.1 it downloads; the rest grows with how many mods you add. You can delete the folder at any time — the next start rebuilds it.

How to use it

1. Install Totem of Mods, Fabric API and CodxLib as usual.
2. Put your old 1.20.1 Forge mod jars straight into mods, together with their dependencies a mod that needs Citadel or Geckolib still needs it, in its 1.20.1 Forge build.
3. Start the game. The first start is slow: Totem downloads a copy of 1.20.1 and its name lists (into totem/), then translates every mod. Later starts reuse that work and are quick.
4. Old Fabric mods go in mods/tom/ instead, so that Fabric Loader doesn't try to load them itself. Old Forge and NeoForge jars are ignored by Fabric Loader, so they can stay in mods.

It tells you what it could not do

Totem writes a report per mod to totem/reports/<mod id>.txt in your instance folder: every method it had to switch off, every piece of Minecraft the mod asked for that no longer exists, and every Mixin patch that no longer fits, each with the reason. A mod that loads completely has an empty report. Nothing is swept under the carpet, and nothing is quietly replaced by something that does nothing — if Totem cannot do a thing, it says so.

Settings

Type /tom in game. Every mod Totem is running that has configurable options gets a page, and so does any companion mod built for Totem. The options are the old mod's own, the same values its config file holds, checked against the mod's own rules before they are written.

Where it stands

Totem is tested against a set of 77 real 1.20.1 Forge mods (35 popular mods plus everything they depend on), loaded together on one server and one client:

• 22 of them load with no complaints at all
• the rest load and run with parts switched off, each part listed in its report
• nothing in the set crashes the game or the world
• Alex's Mobs and Citadel were taken all the way, and are played rather than just launched

Totem never names a single mod in its code. Everything it does is knowledge about how Minecraft changed, so a mod it has never seen gets the same treatment as one that was tested.

What it does not do yet

• Only 1.20.1 Forge sources. NeoForge 1.20.1 and the versions between 1.20.1 and 26.2 are next.
• Only Fabric 26.3 as the target. Forge and NeoForge versions of Totem come later.
• Mods that are mostly Mixins into vanilla code, heavy rendering or custom world generation are the hardest cases and the most likely to come up short.
• Anything older than 1.20.1 is out of scope for now.

Reporting a problem

Please include the mod's report from totem/reports/, and your logs/latest.log. The report usually names the exact thing that is missing, which is far more useful than a description of what went wrong in game.