👋 Hey there,
Great to see you. Whether you're new here or a returning friend - grab your mug and let's dive into this week's topics. ☕️
🕙 Interlude #1 - Wait, Wasn't There An Issue Last Week?
Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed the quiet week. Don't panic - your newsletter didn't get lost in the grinder. There simply wasn't an episode. As announced back in Issue #012, the Second Cup switched to a bi-weekly schedule. Turns out those extra seven days actually go somewhere: more time for research, preparation, other personal projects - and, shocking concept, actually working on my own mods instead of only looking at and testing everyone else's. Imagine that. :3
So with the cup freshly refilled, let's get into this edition's brew.
🔎 Single Bean Spotlight - Hyxcate
This week's bean comes straight out of my interview prep pile. I'm currently working on an interview with ACGaming, and while digging through his portfolio I kept running into this one. Hyxcate is published by IcarussOne, but it's a joint effort by both of them under their EliteModding Collective banner.
The name is a portmanteau of the Greek goddesses Nyx and Hecate - a fitting hint at what's coming, because Hyxcate is a grand sci-fi themed adventure mod centered on day and night events that make Survival considerably more spicy. Fun piece of history: it started as a fork of Nyx for the Hexxit II modpack before evolving into its own standalone mod, with many Nyx features reworked or removed entirely.
The core of the mod is the Hyxcate event system. Nights can roll a Full Moon (more frequent spawns, sometimes with Strength or Resistance buffs, and untamed wolves turning hostile), a Blood Moon (red skies, heavy spawn rates, no sleeping allowed), a Blue Moon (the friendly one - no hostile spawns, faster crop growth, and a free Luck II), or a Star Shower (falling stars everywhere, go catch them). Daytime isn't safe either: a Grim Eclipse blocks out the sun like an extended night with mobs that refuse to burn, and the Red Giant exhausts the sun's fuel, making mobs tankier, fire-immune, and occasionally spawning their "hot" equivalents.
Stars aren't just decoration. Meteors crash down carrying rare alien materials - Meteorite, Frezarite, and Kreknorite - guarded by dangerous creatures like the ever-charged Alien Creeper. Luckily, the extraterrestrial Alien Kitties and Comet Kitties hanging around the crash sites scare the creepers off. Cats saving the day, as it should be. Meow. :3
Links:
GitHub (source and issuetracker)
CurseForge (download)
Moddex.gg (reviews)
Tl;dr: A day/night event mod with falling stars, dangerous meteors, alien materials, and a full endgame gear lineup. Perfect for packs that want the night to feel genuinely threatening again. Also interview with ACGaming coming soon-ish. 👀
📝 Barista's Special - Buildscripts, the Backbone of Mods
First, an interlude, because I can hear you already:
🫖 Interlude #2 - Another Barista's Special?!
Waaaait a minute. Second Barista's Special in a row? At what point do "specials" stop being special? It's almost like there's nothing else left on the menu. ☕️
Believe me, if reaching out to people, researching, preparing, and laying out an interview was easy - while also finding folks who actually want to talk to me - I'd switch back to a weekly schedule just to have enough of them to publish. The truth couldn't be further from that. Between the DMs that go unanswered, the scheduling ping-pong, verifying facts so I don't embarrass myself, the transcription work, and then actually fitting it into the layout... a single interview easily eats a full week of evenings. And I'll admit it plainly: I'm not exactly the networking-and-outreach type of person. Chasing people down for a chat is not in my natural skill tree - I'd much rather sit in a dark corner and write buildscripts. Which is, coincidentally, exactly what this special is about. :)
One policy change worth noting: now that the Atmosphere Field Reporter experiment is over, I'm lifting the requirement for guests to be active on the Atmosphere. I still strongly prefer it, though - I REALLY want to grow the community in that space. But good work deserves coverage regardless of platform.
Now, the actual special.
⛏️ No Way Around Gradle
If you want to set up any Java project, there's no way around Gradle. And for Minecraft specifically, Gradle alone isn't enough - you also need tooling that downloads and patches Minecraft itself into a moddable development environment, gets it running, and spits out your compiled code into a jar that a normal launcher can actually load and play. That whole pipeline is the invisible backbone of every mod you've ever downloaded, and hardly anyone ever thinks about it.
Yes, there are templates123 that do most of the work for you. But where's the learning experience in that? So after forking a template, experimenting with it, and tweaking a few things, I wanted to write my own ones from scratch.
I was in my first Kotlin phase at the time, and I noticed you can write buildscripts in Kotlin too. Jackpot, I thought: practice Kotlin AND get a custom buildscript template for our projects out of it. Turns out writing buildscripts by hand from scratch is hard. But after a few iterations, our Catalyx Template was done. Biggest downsides? It was hardcoded to only support mods written in Kotlin, and it carried a semi-hard dependency on our Catalyx library mod. Our little collective implemented it for almost all of our Kotlin projects anyway, so it worked out for a while.
Quick sidenote for the tech-curious: most of the heavy lifting in the background was handled by RetroFuturaGradle made by the GTNH people. It even works for plain 1.12 projects. But they have the habit of deleting old versions from their maven to save space - so one day the template just broke, because the version my buildscripts pinned was silently removed.
Alright, quick version bump and everything's settled? Mostly, I guess? Back then I was on RetroFuturaGradle v1.4.2. Removed. So I checked the latest: 2.0. What could go wrong? Turns out, a lot - literally nothing worked. v1.4 ran fine on Java 21, but 2.0 depends on Java 25, so there was no easy update path. Luckily they kept the final 1.4 release, v1.4.9, available on their maven, and that hotfix4 saved me from a larger refactor. But it was only a matter of time until that one got deleted too.
Then there's the other problem: I still have Java mods567 I want to use the template for, and the Java-oriented template from the Cleanroom people was missing a few of the features I'd built into our Kotlin one.
So instead of actually working on my projects, I spent the past week rewriting the template. The goals were easy to state: move to Java 25 with RetroFuturaGradle 2.x, keep everything written in Kotlin, but support both Java and Kotlin mods so all of our projects can benefit. I've set up a sneak peek repo - fair warning, the actual buildscripts aren't pushed yet, but there's a README and some documentation of the current state. I'll finish the first release during next week and migrate a few of our projects onto it to shake out the bugs.
The moral of the story: templates save you time, buildscripts teach you things, and maven repositories giveth and taketh away. ☕️
💬 Counter Talk
Spooky Season Wrap-Up 🎃
Halloween is over, but a couple of projects deserve one last encore. finally released his long-teased Pumpkin Carving mod, and celebrated with a little contest: players could submit carved pumpkins, and winners show up on mob heads as little Easter eggs. From dynamic-texture test to release and community event - lovely arc for that one.
And ProvidenceDeamon published a fork of Harvester's Night, featuring new animations and models by himself. The Harvester is back on the menu, spookier than before.
Cleanroom Shakeup
Some organizational news from the Cleanroom project - with the caveat that I haven't had the time to dig into this deeply yet, so treat this as the headline rather than the full story.
As things look, kappa_maintainer has left the organization and is now working on a fork of Cleanroom called Outlands, which makes massive use of AI8. And if that weren't enough movement, Rongmario stepped down from his leading position910 - again - and shortly after a five-headed council was formed to take over leadership.11 Eventful times for the project that powers quite a chunk of the ecosystem. I'll try to take a closer look for a future issue.
🧽 Cleaning the Tables
Alright folks, that's the brew for this edition. Thanks for sipping along. ☕️
Got a mod you think should get the Single Bean spotlight? Or want to be on the other side of an interview? Hit reply or DM me - Atmosphere still preferred, but no longer mandatory.
Next issue lands in two weeks. Stay caffeinated,
~ Enderman