What is ModDex?

Hi everyone! My name is Mari, and welcome to ModDex!

Before I get into the nitty gritty of what ModDex actually is, let me tell you a story of how it came to be, and boy was it a wild ride.

Down the modded rabbit hole

Though I've been playing around with Minecraft mods since 2013, my first foray into the modded scene was with a modpack I took over in 2019 called Rebirth of the Night. I wanted to turn Minecraft into a game I've always wanted and was quickly joined by many talented people who saw my vision for RotN... and it became so much bigger than I expected. Perhaps it was luck, perhaps we were doing something different, perhaps it was a "right place, right time" sort of thing, or a combination of all of those. Either way, before I knew it, I was surrounded by thousands of people who were interested in my project and I was diving head-first into all things modded Minecraft.

As I became more integrated into the modded community, I started to really feel at home within it, realizing just how many talented people are doing cool things and just want to make something. I loved the passion, the discussions on game design, the creativity, the desire to truly turn this game into a means of self-expression. As a modpack developer, the limitations in Minecraft sparked a need to think outside the box, giving you ideas you wouldn't have thought of in a full game engine. That inspiration is, to put simply, so fun! And for once, I was making something that was of genuine value to so many people. I wanted to be involved and give back to the community in any way I knew how, the community where I've made some of my closest friends, learned many valuable skills, and was taught much-needed personal lessons.

The problem I hit

Over the years, I moved on from RotN and took on other projects such as my next creation, Trepidation. And despite many positive reactions from players and being what I still believe is my best modpack yet... I didn't see anywhere near the same success. Truthfully, it was hard on me at times. I wondered if the positive feedback was biased and if my work actually wasn't anything special. I saw other modpacks that garnered hundreds of thousands of players, while many unique and high-quality modpacks were being buried within CurseForge's or Modrinth's discovery pages, putting their focus on popular projects only. Both platforms attempted to lighten the issue by featuring projects every now and then, but it felt random and driven by luck whether your project would get featured or not.

Around this time was when I discovered that Reddit was the primary way to surface attention on any particular project, and a single subreddit at that. It was the primary way to share your thoughts on a project, only to have your post or comment buried days later, which could then only be discovered by the few people who care to use Reddit search and crawl their way through unrelated banter or comments.

What if there were some way to truly promote these hidden gems, I thought. To be able to show people the effort and quality that went into a project without just describing it yourself on your project page, to form a community around discovering and sharing these projects that doesn't just function off word of mouth or buried forum posts?

A prototype called MMC Reviews

In early 2023, I started asking around about ideas for useful tools, since I had some free time and wanted to utilize my web development skills of 10 years to make something for the modded Minecraft community and strengthen my portfolio. That's when user Tempest051 entered the scene. They shared the idea of a "modpack review site" so players could judge the quality of a project by looking at ratings instead of download count. A few others shared their interest in this idea, and I immediately went to town and started a prototype.

Most of my web development experience at that point was in WordPress and PHP, so it was going to be built on that with my own custom plugins and functionality. After a few months, Modded Minecraft Reviews, or just MMC Reviews, was born. At the time, it was very basic and didn't scale well, but I wanted to get it out so people could start writing reviews. Over time, I worked on the site consistently, added new features and QoL, and promoted it where I could. It gained decent traction, but as time went on, I realized just how much it was being held back by its architecture. MMC Reviews didn't have every project on CurseForge or Modrinth and was plagued with other scalability issues. It was clear a rewrite was going to be needed for it to succeed.

Time for a rewrite

I was wanting to get away from WordPress for quite a while for numerous reasons, and it was around this time that I discovered Laravel, an open-source web framework written in PHP. Laravel felt like the answer to everything WordPress was making difficult, and for once, I was excited about web development again! Instead of cramming everything into posts and metadata like I had been, I could actually describe how my data relates to each other: a modpack has many versions, each version has its own list of mods, a review belongs to both a user and a project, etc. Pulling all of that back took a handful of queries instead of hundreds, which meant I could finally hold every project on CurseForge and Modrinth instead of a small list. Instead of hacking things together like I was, Laravel came with a proper queue system, so I could run the constant syncing of hundreds of thousands of projects from CurseForge and Modrinth in the background across multiple workers, with retries and actual visibility when something broke. The convenience of Laravel freed up a lot of my focus to also build features like reputation and community tags rather than bending a CMS into something it was never meant to be. Frankly, it was silly to use WordPress at all, but at the time I was admittedly quite stubborn... for better or worse haha.

After over a year and a half of hard but rewarding work, ModDex.gg was born. I decided to change the name and completely rebrand for a few reasons, mainly because MMC Reviews already developed a name for itself, and ModDex was massively different in terms of its new features and end-goal. I wanted people to see just how much better it was in every way! ModDex was built to grow and scale easily, and even can support other games in the future!

So, what is ModDex?

ModDex is a place to find and review Minecraft mods and modpacks. Every project on CurseForge and Modrinth lives here in one spot, so you don't have to bounce between platforms or wonder if the mod you're hunting for is on the other platform. When you find something, you can leave a rating and a written review, and you can read what everyone else thought before you commit hours to downloading, configuring, and playing it. No more judging a project by its download count and description and hoping for the best. On that note, both CurseForge and Modrinth have been wonderfully supportive of ModDex, giving me explicit permission to use their APIs to make this happen, and I can't thank them enough for their support and encouragement.

Keeping reviews honest

The reviews are the whole point, so I've tried hard to make them something you can actually trust. Every review comes from a real person, and the more thoughtful reviews you write, the more reputation you earn by receiving upvotes, which is my way of surfacing the people who put real care into their feedback. There are no sponsorships in place of recommendations and no way to buy your way to the top. We've also got community and creator guidelines to keep things honest, so a popular modder can't just ping their Discord and farm a ton of five-star ratings. A great project rises because people say it's great, not because it already had a head start. That's the site I wish existed back when Trepidation was sitting unnoticed in discovery pages and old Reddit threads.

More than reviews

On top of reviews, there's a ton of stuff to help you find your next modpack. ModDex was built to have a deep search and filtering system that lets you include or exclude any combination you want. You can filter and search by loader, version, genre, community tags that other players have added, and a lot more. You can build a library of modpacks you plan to play/completed/etc, compare modpacks side by side, and follow the ones you want to keep an eye on. I've definitely lost entire evenings to reading about modpacks I'll probably never play or complete, so a lot of ModDex is just the tooling I always wished I had for that.

Now, it's your turn

But a review site is only as good as the people writing reviews, and that's where you come in. If there's a modpack you love, go leave a review and tell people why. If one let you down, that's just as useful to know. Add the projects you care about to your library, tag things, correct things, share ModDex on Reddit, and if you make mods or modpacks yourself, point people to your ModDex page. This community gave me my closest friends, a skillset, and truthfully a lot of who I am today. ModDex is my attempt to give something back, but it only really works if it's ours and not just mine.

And one more thing: while ModDex is miles ahead of its predecessor MMC Reviews, I still have so much planned for it, and I'm working on it basically all the time. I'd love for your feedback to make ModDex even better. I'm sure there's plenty I haven't thought of yet that you probably have. Join the Discord, comment on our Bluesky posts, or send an email. However you reach me, I'm always open to listen.

Thanks for reading, and welcome to ModDex. I really can't wait to see where things go from here.

— Mari (CalaMariGold)