Leashable Boats Minecraft Mod

Leashable Boats is a Minecraft mod that I developed during summer 2022, eager to test out the new concepts that I had learned from AP Computer Science A in high school. I have always been interested in how games were made, and figured that a mod would be a good way to apply my new Java knowledge. It turned out to be a fun project for me to make as I was able to successfully integrate specific features that I had wanted into the game, and I was also able to share my work with the community, with approximately 1,300 people who have benefitted from my mod now. I joined several modding discords during the process and explored the work of other developers making mods that bridge the gap between the two versions of Minecraft, like the GeyserMC project, which I can appreciate as both a gamer and a developer.

From an educational perspective, I gained a thorough understanding of classes, inheritance, interfaces, and typecasting. These were all extremely useful concepts to understand going in to my first CS class at UCSD, CSE 11, which was a Java-based class that taught these very concepts. In addition, I found out that interesting behavior like the ability to inject code into already defined classes at runtime was possible (which is acheived through the Mixin project by SpongePowered).

I would say that this mod was worth it for a beginner project, and it even brings me value today as a more seasoned developer, inspiring me to make more mods and pursue more fun projects in the future. I find the time investment that goes into keeping the mod up to date (when I get free time to do so) worth it as long as some people out there can enjoy the enhancement that it brings to their game. After all, there is no point in hacking or modding unless there is some cause to work towards, whether it be a community to contribute to, or another way to better society.

The mod being used.

A snippet of the mod code.

Comments for the release on CurseForge.

The mod description on CurseForge.