How to pick a modpack to play with friends (that everyone sticks with)

You've found the perfect modpack. You send it to the group. One friend's game won't start, another gets overwhelmed by the 300 mods and quits after an hour, and the third only wanted to build houses anyway. A week later you're playing alone.

Packs for friends need different choices from packs for yourself. Here's how to make one that the whole group sticks with.

Ask before you add

Before choosing a single mod, ask each person one question: what do you want to do in this world? You'll get answers like:

• "Build a big base and make it look good."
• "Automate everything."
• "Fight hard bosses."
• "Explore and find cool places."
• "Farm, cook, chill."

Now you have your pack: one or two strong mods for each answer, and nothing that nobody asked for.

Keep it smaller than you think

Big kitchen-sink packs are fun to scroll through and hard to play. Every extra mod adds items to search through, recipes to learn, load time, and things that can go wrong. For a group, especially one with newer players, a focused pack of fifty to a hundred mods is usually much more fun than three hundred.

A good test: can you explain the pack in one sentence? "Create and farming with some boss fights" is a pack. "Everything" isn't.

Pick mods that play well together

Some combinations just work:

• A tech mod with a building flavour (Create is the classic) suits groups who like both building and machines, because the machines are builds.
• Exploration plus bosses gives explorers a reason to go far and fighters something to find.
• Farming plus cooking gives relaxed players a progression of their own that doesn't depend on keeping up with the tech player.

Avoid adding two mods that do the same big job, like two magic systems or two sets of ores and machines. They split the group instead of bringing it together, and they tend to bring duplicate metals and recipe shortcuts with them.

Give everyone a next step

New players quit when they don't know what to do. A quest book fixes most of that: it shows where to start and what each mod's milestones are. A recipe viewer (JEI or EMI) answers "how do I make this?" without anyone needing to open a wiki.

Make sure everyone can run it

• Include performance mods so friends on older laptops can keep up.
• Check how much memory the pack needs and tell everyone what to set. (See how much RAM a modpack needs.)
• Test with the weakest computer in the group, not the strongest.

Get everyone on the same version

The most common way a group server dies is that it slowly drifts: one person's launcher updates a mod, someone adds a minimap that turns out to need the server, the server gets a fix nobody else has. Then nobody can join, and you get messages like mismatched mod channel list. For the ways to get everyone into one world (LAN, a join mod or a server), see how to play modded Minecraft with friends.

• Share the pack as an export file or a link to the pack, not a zip of your mods folder.
• Turn off automatic mod updates.
• When you do update, update the server and everyone at the same time, and back up the world first.

Let Packspire do the boring part

Packspire is built for exactly this. Pick what the group wants (machines, magic, adventure, bosses, farming, cooking, building, exploring) and a difficulty. It picks mods that get along, adds performance mods tested together, writes a starter quest book, and starts the pack on a real server with the real game client joining it, before anyone downloads it. Paid plans add a server pack with the same mod versions as the player pack (minus client-only mods like minimaps), and every pack page says how much memory players and the server need.

Build your group's pack. And if your group is prone to the 2 week Minecraft phase, we have thoughts on that too.

Frequently asked questions

What are good mods to play with friends?

Mods with a shared project work best: Create (machines that are also builds), boss and exploration mods that reward going out together, and farming and cooking mods for relaxed players. Add a recipe viewer and a quest book.

How do I share a modpack with friends?

Export it from your launcher (the CurseForge app and Modrinth App both export a file friends can import), rather than zipping your mods folder. For a server, also make a server pack without client-only mods.

How do I stop my friends' mods getting out of sync?

Turn off automatic mod updates, share the pack as an export, and update the server and everyone's game at the same time.

Do all players need the same mods as the server?

Every mod that adds content must match the server exactly. Purely client-side mods, like minimaps, can differ.

Sources

• Create
• JEI and EMI, recipe viewers