#modding

The Song That Launched a Mod

I was coding when “The Distance” by Cake came on. You know the one—“He’s going the distance, he’s going for speed…”

And I thought: what if that was a Minecraft mod? What if the farther you traveled from spawn, the harder the game got? Not just a little harder. Exponentially, absurdly, ridiculously harder.

So I made it. And I called it “He’s Going the Distance” because sometimes the best project names come from whatever song happens to be playing.

The Build: Standing on the Shoulders of Mutualisms

This mod came together fast. Way faster than my previous Minecraft mod about ecological partnerships.

Why? Two reasons:

1. I’d already learned Minecraft’s core systems. The mutualism mod taught me how Fabric works, how game mechanics layer together, how to think about mob behaviors and world generation. That knowledge transferred directly.

2. This mod is conceptually simpler. No custom mobs. No new blocks or items. No complex ecological relationships. Just one core mechanic: distance from spawn affects difficulty.

The implementation touches everything—mob health, spawn rates, damage scaling, the works—but it’s all variations on a single idea. And once again, Claude Code made it possible. What would have taken me weeks (or months) of researching Minecraft’s difficulty systems happened in a few focused sessions.

The QA Session: Boats, Zombies, and Beautiful Chaos

Here’s where it got fun.

A friend was staying over, and I recruited them for playtesting. We loaded up the mod, spawned into the world, and started exploring.

At first, everything seemed normal. Minecraft as usual. But as we traveled farther from spawn—building our way across oceans in boats—the game started to reveal its teeth.

Then we got far enough.

Zombies started spawning on our boats. Not near us. Not in the water. Literally materializing on the boat we were riding.

We died. A lot.

But here’s the thing: we were laughing the entire time. The absurdity of the escalating difficulty, the chaos of trying to navigate while zombies spawn-killed us—it was exactly the kind of ridiculous gameplay moment I’d hoped for.

The Design Evolution: Accidentally Making a Co-op Mod

Testing with another person revealed something I hadn’t anticipated: this isn’t really a single-player mod.

Playing solo, the difficulty curve felt punishing. Too steep. You’d venture out, get overwhelmed, die, and feel frustrated.

Playing co-op? Perfect. The escalating challenge felt like an adventure you were tackling together. The difficulty became a shared obstacle instead of a personal failure.

So I adjusted the scaling. Made it more gradual. Tweaked it shorter and shorter until we found the sweet spot—a difficulty curve that ramped up just fast enough to feel exciting with a partner, but not so fast that it became frustrating.

The mod became tuned for two players almost by accident. And honestly? That’s way more interesting than what I originally envisioned.

What I Learned: Different Kinds of Fun

Building this mod taught me something about my own creative process.

I love both types of modding:

• Content mods (like the mutualism mod): Adding new things to the world—mobs, blocks, mechanics, ecological relationships
• Gameplay mods (like this one): Tweaking how existing systems work to create new experiences

They scratch different creative itches. Content mods are about world-building and narrative. Gameplay mods are about systems design and balancing.

Right now, I’m enjoying exploring both. Trying different ideas, building quick prototypes, seeing what sticks. I’m not trying to commit to one massive mod project—I’m experimenting until I find something I want to spend serious time on.

And that feels right. This whole return to Minecraft modding isn’t about building the perfect mod. It’s about rediscovering why I fell in love with game development in the first place.

The Technical Bit: What Actually Changes

For those curious about implementation, here’s what scales with distance from spawn:

• Mob health: Farther enemies are tougher to kill
• Mob spawn rates: More hostiles appear as you explore
• Mob damage: Hits hurt more the farther you are
• Everything else I could think of: The mod touches pretty much every difficulty parameter Minecraft exposes

The scaling is gradual now (thanks to playtesting), but venture far enough and you’ll absolutely notice the difference.

What’s Next

For now, the mod is “done.” Not done-done—there’s always more tuning, more features, more polish. But done enough that I’m happy with it.

I’ll probably play it with more people, see how it holds up with different group sizes, maybe discover new breaking points or hilarious failure modes.

Eventually I might come back and expand it. Add configuration options for the scaling curve. Implement different difficulty profiles. Who knows.

But right now? I’m ready to start the next experiment. Another mod idea, another gameplay concept, another song-inspired project name.

Reflections: Speed Running Creative Ideas

What strikes me most about this project is the velocity.

Idea → working prototype → playtested → tuned → “shipped” in a timeframe that would have been impossible for me even a year ago. Not because I’m a better programmer (though I am learning), but because the tools have changed.

Claude Code didn’t write this mod for me. It helped me build it. There’s a difference. I still made every design decision, tuned every parameter, playtested every iteration. But I didn’t have to spend days hunting through Minecraft’s source code or deciphering outdated modding tutorials.

It’s the same creative flow I found with the mutualism mod, just applied to a different kind of project. And I’m starting to realize: this is how I want to make things. Fast iteration, rapid prototyping, shipping ideas before they have time to get stale.

He’s going the distance. He’s going for speed.

Turns out that song was more appropriate than I thought.

Where It Started

I got into programming because of Minecraft.

I went to art school, not CS. In high school, there was a comp sci teacher—when I asked if I could join his class (even while helping one of his students with their homework), he said my grades were too bad. No bootcamp either. Just me, YouTube, and a lot of Buckey’s Java tutorials. I learned just enough to make some custom blocks, items, and armor.

After all these years—after professional development work, web apps, CMS projects, everything—I’m back. And it feels awesome.

The Spark: A Book About Partnerships

I’ve been reading “The Call of the Honeyguide” by Rob Dunn, and it’s been a real inspiration recently. The book is about mutualisms—the reciprocal relationships between species where everyone benefits.

The title comes from a partnership in nature: In sub-Saharan Africa, the greater honeyguide bird has evolved a specific call—used only to attract humans. The bird leads people to beehives because it wants the wax inside, but it can’t access the hive on its own. Humans get honey, the bird gets wax. Everyone wins.

I’ve been experimenting with clay and ceramics lately, trying to find a way to combine that with the ideas from this book—but I haven’t found a compelling idea yet. About Minecraft, both wanting to play it and rethink about making mods, the two ideas just overlapped perfectly. So I went for it.

The Vibe Code Session

Here’s the wild part: I went from idea to working prototype in just a few hours.

How? Claude Code and pure creative flow—vibe coding. But don’t get me wrong, there was planning. Claude and I sat down and talked through different types of mutualisms before we even discussed turning it into a Minecraft mod. The planning and architecture documents were all part of the vibe coding process.

The experience was insane. I haven’t touched Minecraft modding in years, and getting up to speed with the modern Fabric toolchain and current Java practices would have taken me 2-3 years of learning. But in just one night, Claude helped me navigate it all—the development environment, the game mechanics, everything. It felt like pair programming with someone who had infinite patience for my “what if we tried this?” ideas.

The Assets: Textures and Models

Here’s something I didn’t expect: Claude Desktop also generated all the visual assets.

Block textures, item sprites, mob models—everything. I just gave it technical requirements: “16x16 pixels, PNG format, filename should be honeyguide_egg.png” and it would spit out pixel art. No style direction, no references, no iterations. Just worked first try.

Are they amazing? No. They’re fine. Functional placeholders that get the job done. The kind of thing I’d normally spend hours hunting through asset packs or attempting (badly) in a pixel art editor. But for rapid prototyping? Perfect. I can see them getting better with more iteration or if I spent time refining the prompts, but honestly, I didn’t need to.

The fact that I could go from “I need a yucca moth sprite” to having one in my inventory system in minutes meant I never lost momentum. No context switching to art tools, no breaking flow to find temporary assets. Just describe what I needed and keep building.

What We Built: Symbiotic Survival

The mod is called Symbiotic Survival, and it’s about teaching players that understanding and preserving natural partnerships is more rewarding than exploitation.

The Honeyguide

The star of the show—these birds lead players to bee nests, just like their real-world counterparts. But here’s where it gets interesting for game design:

You don’t learn this through a tutorial. You learn it by watching.

Bee keeper villagers interact with honeyguides naturally. You see them following the bird, harvesting honey, and sharing larvae as a reward. The honeyguide remembers this positive interaction.

Then you see a pillager encounter a honeyguide. The bird tries to lead them to honey, but they just attack it. No honey, no understanding, no mutualism.

Players learn the mechanic through emergent storytelling, not UI pop-ups.

Biome-Specific Mutualists

Each biome has its own pollinator-plant partnership:

• Fig wasps in jungle biomes
• Yucca moths in desert regions
• And eight more unique pairs across the world

Here’s the core mechanic that makes it work: Destroy the pollinator’s home (nest, hive, etc.), and the nearby tree stops producing fruit.

Want sustainable resources? Preserve the partnership. It’s ecology 101 through gameplay consequences.

What This Taught Me About Game Design

Building this reminded me why games are such powerful teaching tools. Nobody wants to read a textbook about fig wasps and their obligate mutualism with fig trees. But make it a game mechanic where destroying the wasp nest means no more figs? Suddenly players care about fig wasps.

The villager and pillager interactions added another digestible layer to the game. Players can learn by watching NPCs interact with the honeyguide, seeing the difference between cooperation and conflict play out organically.

Unexpected Discovery: How Claude Codes Differently for Games

Here’s something I didn’t expect: Claude Code approaches game development completely differently than web development.

In all my web projects—portfolio sites, CMS work, API development—Claude tends to go straight to production-ready code. Clean, complete implementations. When it says something is “done,” it’s done.

But with Minecraft modding? It’s working in a fundamentally different mode.

The Incremental Approach

Claude’s strategy for this mod has been relentlessly incremental:

• Make sure a single block loads before worrying about the whole tree system
• Get items rendering properly before even touching mob spawning logic
• Test one mechanic in isolation before building the next layer

At first I thought this was just being cautious. But then I realized: it’s actually the right approach for game development. Game mechanics need to be felt and tested iteratively in ways that web features don’t.

The TODO Philosophy

Here’s where it gets interesting: Claude leaves TODOs everywhere.

// TODO: Implement proper particle effects for pollination
// TODO: Add sound effects for honeyguide calls
// TODO: Optimize tree search algorithm for large forests

And then it marks the feature as “completed.”

My web dev brain initially rebelled at this. “That’s not done! There are TODOs!” But for rapid prototyping? This is actually ideal. The core mechanic works. The polish can come later. Claude’s definition of “completion” in this context means “working prototype, next chunk unlocked.”

I definitely prefer this for the creative exploration phase—but it requires vigilance. You need to know the difference between “works well enough to test the next idea” and “actually production ready.”

The Refactoring Moment

The tradeoff hit me when I discovered leaves were withering away even though they were attached to wood blocks.

Bug, right? Turns out: not exactly.

Through investigation, I found that Claude had set up our custom blocks using generic Minecraft block models—enough to get them rendering and testable, but not properly inheriting from the specialized PillarBlock and LeavesBlock classes they needed.

It was intentionally halfway. Test first, refactor to spec later.

So I spent time refactoring tree blocks to properly extend PillarBlock, leaves to inherit from LeavesBlock, getting all the proper behaviors instead of generic placeholders. Not hard, but something I hadn’t expected to do after Claude said the blocks were “working.”

Different Domains, Different Workflows

What I’m learning: this placeholder-heavy, chunk-at-a-time approach actually makes sense for game development in a way it doesn’t for web.

With web apps, you generally want components to be production-ready before you build the next layer on top. But with game mechanics, you need to play with rough implementations to know if they’re even fun before you polish them.

The honeyguide’s pathfinding didn’t need to be perfect to test whether the “follow the bird” mechanic was engaging. The tree-pollinator relationship didn’t need optimized neighbor-searching algorithms to validate that “destroy nest → no fruit” was the right game feel.

Claude seems to understand this implicitly. Or maybe game development just naturally encourages this workflow, and Claude adapts to it.

Either way: if you’re using Claude Code for game development, embrace the TODOs. Embrace the placeholders. They’re not tech debt—they’re creative scaffolding.

Just remember to come back and actually implement them eventually.

More Screenshots

What’s Next

Right now, it’s a prototype. The honeyguide works, the basic pollination mechanics are in, and the emergent villager behavior is chef’s kiss. But there’s so much more I want to add:

• More complex mutualism chains: What if trees that depend on bird pollinators also provide fruit that feeds those birds? Break the chain anywhere and everything suffers.
• Seasonal behaviors: Migration patterns, seasonal blooms, hibernation cycles
• Player education mechanics: Maybe an in-game journal that fills in with observations, like Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule Compendium
• Consequences for restoration: If you’ve damaged an ecosystem, can you restore the mutualism? What does that look like mechanically?

But honestly? Even if I just polish what exists now, I’m proud of it. It’s a full circle moment—returning to where I started as a developer, but with years of experience and new tools that let me build in hours what would have taken weeks before.