Recommendations On What To Avoid

Most Mod Download Websites

• A good portion of sites for Minecraft mods have malware or steal mods. I'd only recommend using Modrinth, MCArchive, github and whatever official pages a mod has for downloading from.
• If the mod wasn't released recently then Curseforge might also be a viable option but read the section on curseforge for why I'd advise against this whenever you can

Hamachi

• Conflicts with the internet, and can cause issues with authentication
• I've personally had it mess up my network drivers since it installs a network driver to function
• Acts as a VPN
• See Mod Recommendations > Hosting worlds to play with friends for hosting alternatives

Literally any VPN

• VPNs have a history of messing up how Minecraft sends packets, this can actually get you banned from servers in some cases
• VPNs change how servers identify you by changing your IP, this could theroetically make you suffer a ban from the server detecting it or someone else getting IP banned and then you unluckily getting the IP that was banned
• If you're using a VPN for security reasons, refer to this video by Tom Scott

MCLeaks/TheAltening

• Stolen/Illegal account generator. Refer to Piracy
• Follow this Minecraft Hopper article for fix/removal

Paid Custom Content

• While things like paid cosmetics are not in violation of the Minecraft Usage Guidelines, they are specifically against the Minecraft's End User License Agreement. Refer to Any Mods you create for Minecraft: Java Edition from scratch belong to you (including pre-run Mods and in-memory Mods) and you can do whatever you want with them, as long as you don't sell them for money / try to make money from them and so long as you don’t distribute Modded Versions of the game
Interestingly, Mojang actually did send a cease and desist to Physics mod for having a Patreon "pro" version of Physics Mod so I'm not completely sure why it applies in some cases but not others
• This includes OptiFine, Essential, Badlion, Feather and Lunar from what I know.
• Refer to Figura or CPM in Mod Recommendations for free cosmetic alternatives and an example of Figura.

Most "clients" and many launchers

• Some clients and/or launchers will directly login to your account instead of asking for permission using a oAuth token. This means the client has FULL access to your Microsoft account. You can tell if this happens by if DOESN'T ask for a code or open your web browser to sign in. If the client you are using requires direct login to your microsoft account, Immediately uninstall the launcher and change your Microsoft Account Password as the client has FULL ACCESS TO YOUR MICROSOFT ACCOUNT AND A MINECRAFT CLIENT OR LAUNCHER SHOULD NEVER NEED THIS
Some clients will ask for administator or superuser access, the vanilla game and mods should never
• require administrator access after installation.
• Most clients are closed source, meaning you cannot see the code for the client
• Many clients have some invasive privacy policies where they can collect a lot of information about you that Minecraft itself doesn't even collect. A Minecraft client should NEVER need access to your Internet activity, geo-location, phone number, home address?!?!?!?! WHY IS THIS IN LUNAR CLIENT'S PRIVACY POLICY??!?!?!? THEY CAN EVEN SELL IT TO OTHER COMPANIES?!??!??!?!?!?
• Some clients and launchers will obfuscate their code. This makes it harder to figure out why your game crashed, and makes it harder to know what the client is ACTUALLY doing
• You have far more control over what goes into a modpack opposed to a client that might have stolen mods or just edit code without telling you. Mods can also do this but it's easier to avoid them in your own modpack
• Many clients contain paid goodies, Refer to Paid Custom Content

Feather Client

• Steals mods/has stolen mods in the past and has modified them, which could cause issues and is definitely suspicious
• Directly modifies the vanilla client AND fabric(If you crash the game, the crashlog will explicitly state it's using Feather client's Fabric, which indicates that Fabric's name is being changed)
• Uses custom libraries
• Obfuscates code
• Refer to Most "clients"

Lunar Client AND Badlion

• Both Lunar Client and Badlion Client are owned by Moonsworth, LLC.- They both serve mostly the same purpose and for some reason Moonsworth doesn't advertise owning Badlion even though they both link to the same terms/privacy policy pages and both have copyright from the company. In My Opinion, this is just shady business behavior.
• Badlion has an anticheat that runs in the background with driver level permissions 24/7 WHICH NO MINECRAFT CLIENT SHOULD REQUIRE
• Redistributes and modifies mods (especially OptiFine) without permission from the creators
• Suspicious behavior like obfuscating logs. Fun fact, obfuscating logs can make it difficult or even impossible to troubleshoot what's going on with your game if you encounter an issue
• I remember an issue where Lunar Client had broken hit detection for a short period of time, not sure if this was actually true, if so, it shouldn't be editing player behavior
• Several people have encountered Lunar Client acting like an Alt account generator, causing the game to disallow them from joining servers. IF you get a "Switch to Mojang Mode" error, that's Lunar Client.. You should switch away immediately and change your Microsoft account's password
• Lunar Client uses your normal .minecraft folder. This is extremely bad practice because if Lunar Client breaks somehow, it can clash with the normal launcher and either cause the launcher to exhibit the same issues or just cause other issues in general.
• Their privacy policy is suspicious as hell, IF you plan on continuing to use lunar client for whatever reason, please please look at it and fully grasp what they're using. Like, A Minecraft client should NEVER need access to your Internet activity, geo-location, phone number, or home address?!?!?!?! WHY IS THIS IN LUNAR CLIENT'S PRIVACY POLICY??!?!?!?
• Refer to Most "clients"

TLauncher (Not ATLauncher)

• Steals mods
• FROM MY OWN PERSONAL TESTING, it installs suspicious certificates authorities onto your computer. This means TLauncher can preform Man In The Middle attacks on your computer. Computerphile has a video explaining how these work
• Stole the name and some other drama with TL Legacy/TL Legacy Launcher
• Refer to Many launchers
• Refer to Pirated Launchers and/or account generators
• It has code for crashing antiviruses. A Minecraft launcher should never do this!
• Tries to profit off of piracy by providing subscriptions and cosmetics that you can recreate for free and end up being more expensive than the actual game.
• Paying for the "Forever plan" on TLauncher costs about 20 USD. You can buy Minecraft "Standard Edition" for 30 USD. This includes both Java and Bedrock edition.
• If you pay for TLaunchers "Popular" 3 month subscription, you will end up spending more money on TLauncher over the course of a year than you would've if you just saved the money and bought Minecraft "Standard Edition".
• Ironically you'd get better value just saving up and buying the Standard Edition and using Figura, CPM, Ears, or even More Player Models(On really old versions). Figura and CPM allow you to create your own. I even have an example in my mod recommendations
• I cannot stress enough, please do NOT use TLauncher. I know that if you're using this, I'm NOT going to convince you to buy the game, but there's so many better ways to play Minecraft that don't involve feeding into this disgusting company
• Modrinth and Prism launcher are good alternatives

Pirated Launchers(and/or account generators)

• In general, most of these launchers will modify the game in some way to allow the game to play. They do NOT need to do this!
• Some of these launchers or account generators might modify system files. You don't need to modify ANY system files to play the game for free so any launchers doing this are probably doing it for malicious reasons.
• Some of these launchers will use their own jars and libraries, This absurdly bad because it makes the game less stable. The most common use of this is an authlib injector, this is NOT required to play the game without an account!
• Some of these launchers are closed source which is not good usually
• Refer to Many launchers as many pirated launchers will do stuff in this category and some will even try to get money out of it like TLauncher
• Some people argue that "Microsoft doesn't need anymore money" or something similar. Sadly the fact of the matter is, to legally play Minecraft, you need to buy it from minecraft.net or buy a gamecard for it from a authorized retailer like Walmart or Amazon. There's nothing we can LEGALLY do about this
• Most communities are UNABLE To help with a pirated copy of the game. We do not know what your launcher is doing to bypass authentication and that can cause problems. On top of that, it is quite literally ILLEGAL for us to help. Some of us genuinely do want to help you but we quite literally can't.
If you really want to play the game, I'd really recommend purchasing it if you can(Especially as soon as you can since inflation is really hitting hard lately and prices are going up). If you really can't buy the game, look towards luanti(Formerly Minetest) or maybe use an open source launcher if you really must. Just be careful and please don't expect support with pirated or cracked copies of the game, refer to all of the reasons above for why Minecraft Community Support, Prism Launcher, Modded Minecraft and other Discord servers or communities CANNOT help with these launchers even if it wasn't against their rules(Which it is).

Curseforge

• Curseforge has had instances of weird practices like allowing illegal copies of Iris/Sodium for a while.
• Curseforge uses anti-competitive behaviors like making it more difficult to install some mods on other launchers by forcing you to manually download the mods, which forces you to wait 5 seconds, and seemingly breaking Prism Launcher's ability to search for mods without listing unrelated mods(?)
• Curseforge forced Modrinth to remove support for Curseforge mods from their modpacks
Curseforge has about 25% of my screen reserved for ads compared to maybe 5% from Modrinth. Prism Launcher doesn't and Modrinth's are small in the bottom right and usually
• for their own services opposed to Curseforge's google ads.
Link to comparison I made. Note I have a pihole setup blocking ads so neither Modrinth nor curseforge are able to use Google ads
• I'd only recommend using curseforge if you can't find a mod on Modrinth or MCArchive, for older versions of the game or if you have to.
• If you do use curseforge, I'd recommend downloading the jar for the mod directly or using Prism and recommend against using their launcher

OptiFine(On 1.14 and above)

• Has violated Minecraft's EULA several times in the past.
• Closed source, basically nobody can see the source code, This is really bad for mod compatibility, which should be a huge worry for a mod that used to be essential for your mod list.
• Can cause a lot of issues due to how it changes rendering.
• Sodium or Embeddium provide far better performance, Iris or Oculus provide better shader support, and you can find alternatives with more features.
• Stole a bunch of features from MCPatcher, STILL bragging about making it obsolete on it's website TO THIS DAY(Dec 12th, 2025)

• Refer to Paid Custom Content
• Note, if you're using any Minecraft version belore 1.14, most mods usually expect or atleast work with OptiFine and I haven't really seen many alternatives. You might be able to find some backports of Sodium like angelica if you do some looking though

Essential

While there is technically nothing wrong with using Essential. I personally do not like it because:

• Many older mods that require this will force install it into your Minecraft instance without any consent and doesn't even ask you, in my experience
• On older versions of the mod(In 1.8.9 for example), it has installed itself to a seperate folder and will continue loading even if you remove the mod from your mods folder without also removing the essential folder from your .minecraft
• It has a tendency to clutter logs with errors that make it really really annoying to diagnose what's causing an issue. Usually if someone has essential installed, one of my first actions is to have them remove it and re-encounter the issue JUST so I can read their log</li> As a note, it looks like this is caused by Forge and Kotlin(the language used by Esssential). While I would lean on it being Essential's fault since I rarely see other mods exhibit this behavior- It's possible it's not Essential's fault at all.
• From logs I've seen, it seems to inject itself into weird places? Like I've seen it inject into main vanilla Minecraft button stuff?
• Possibly has DRM? It seems to check your hosts file? A Minecraft mod should probably not be doing this Nevermind, this is actually just a check to see if you have alt gens.
• It adds cosmetics I believe are expensive, refer to Paid Custom Content
• Here are the prices I get for Essential's currency:
  In order to buy "Mixed Angel Wings" I'd need to use 1,200 of Essential's currency. I would have to either pay $19.99 for 2,500(+300) or $15.97 to get 2,000 to buy this set of wings. You may argue "Well, you also get extra currency to spend on other things".
  I feel like this is predatory as it means no matter what, there's an entry cost of at least $8.00 and then that leaves you with money left over just sitting there to entice you to buy more currency.
  From my point of view: I can either make these myself in Blockbench and add them to Figura or cpm for FREE or pay someone to make something like them for me in Figura and then I'd be supporting an independent creator which would only be recieving the one-time payment from the asset they're making so the $15 would be more justified opposed to the possible thousands of purchases from something like Essential.
Refer to Figura or CPM in Mod Recommendations for free
• cosmetic alternatives and refer to Mod Recommendations > Hosting worlds to play with friends for hosting alternatives

MCreator

While there is technically nothing wrong with just using mcreator. I'd recommend against using it since:
• It's known to generate really weird code
• It uses reflection in places it doesn't need to. Basically, reflection is really slow compared to just directly accessing things. Ex: instead of just doing Object -> Field, it'll do something like Object -> Class -> getField -> Field.
• In my experience, mods made with it are less stable or laggier than mods made directly in Java or Kotlin
If possible, I'd honestly recommend learning Java over using MCreator.
Fabric and Neoforge have guides and documentation for starting out

The Vanilla Launcher

It might seem counter-intuitive but the base launcher is honestly pretty unstable and isn't the best for modding

Java Edition on Android

Java edition isn't meant to be played on Mobile. Mobile GPU's don't directly support the version of OpenGL Minecraft uses, so many mods won't work correctly. (STUB)

Recommendations On What To Avoid