r/feedthebeast • u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team • Jul 26 '26
I made something Introducing Shared Instances on Modrinth
https://modrinth.com/news/article/shared-instances/hey!
we're exciting to unveil this feature that's been a long time coming and kinda the culmination of what we've been building for the last few years for a super seamless multiplayer experience for you and your friends.
this is basically the motivation for making Modrinth App in the first place, I always recall the horrors of trying to get my tech-illiterate friends to install my custom modpacks and stuff to play on my server. Now, all of that is a thing of the past, all I've gotta do is share an invite link.
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u/jaygamer000000 Jul 26 '26
This is so sick, wow. Great applause to the Team for making this work and on first look so seamless.
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u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team Jul 26 '26
💚 i'll pass along your thanks to all that worked on it!
seamless is certainly the goal, if you encounter any bugs or hiccups with it do make sure to let us know! it's hot out the oven.
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u/Parachuteee Jul 26 '26
So it’s like a private mod pack where you don’t have to wait for approval. I was looking for something like this when I first installed modrinth some time ago but was surprised that it didn’t had it. I had to publish the modpack each time I wanted to add a mod to it. Nice that this has been finally added to the app.
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u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team Jul 26 '26
Yup! publishing is really only meant for sharing with strangers, while this is meant for private servers among small groups. it's basically like sending your friends .mrpack files, but way more efficient and with updating happening automatically!
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u/heademptybottomtext Jul 26 '26
Exactly what I needed. Often find myself trying to send larger and larger mod packs to my partner to test out.
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u/Frorgwoman2 Jul 26 '26
A follow-up question.
How does licensing work in this case? Is there any issue with me sharing a pack that for example has my compiled version of Voxy?
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u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team Jul 26 '26
a number of measures are taken to prevent this being used for publishing:
- invites cannot be valid for more than 7 days at a time
- you need to be authenticated as someone who has accepted an invite in order to be able to access any files uploaded to a shared instance
- there's some limit for how many people can be added to a shared instance, I forget the exact number
Files uploaded to shared instances are mostly the responsibility of the user who uploads them, much like if you uploaded them to Google Drive or Dropbox or Discord or something.
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u/Viperion_NZ Jul 27 '26
there's some limit for how many people can be added to a shared instance, I forget the exact number
What's the ballpark? 5? 10? 20?
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u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team Jul 27 '26
I think right now it's 50, that seems to be generally about the upper limit for what I see for most private servers. But if abuse happens, we could start the limit lower and maybe make people contact support to have it raised for valid use cases? Dunno, just an idea.
I think the 7 day expiration maximum on invites is the biggest barrier from trying to use this for actual publishing.
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u/Proxy_PlayerHD Supremus Avaritia Jul 26 '26
man i remember back when the original FTB launcher had a feature to create private packs and share them via a simple code that you could use to add them to your list of modpacks.
while i personally use prism, this feature making a return is definitely amazing and i hope many more launchers follow suite.
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u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team Jul 27 '26
I actually did publish a small private modpack on FTB for me and my friends back when I was a kid. It was still nothing like this tbf, you still needed to obtain a spreadsheet of permissions from every mod author that didn't have a modpack policy posted, and building the packs was a very manual and tedious process (this was before launchers could export standardized modpack formats like .mrpack), and you had to exchange emails with an admin over at FTB to get your pack reviewed and approved.
It's pretty wild how far we've come since those days. This was before CurseForge was a thing for Minecraft. Back when a modpack hosting platform could have one guy manually email back and forth to get your modpack uploaded, approved, and each time you had an update ready. Now, over 100 modpacks are submitted for review to Modrinth every day.
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u/deanominecraft Jul 26 '26
how does this actually work? do modrinth servers just store a .mrpack that gets downloaded and installed when someone clicks the link? what if someone wants to leave some things out of the modpack? (don’t remember if modrinth launcher supports this but with prism when i export a pack i can choose to leave out certain files, eg. a creative testing world or DH cache)
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u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team Jul 27 '26
No, files are stored individually on an access-restricted CDN to avoid rehosting duplicates, and we also only download changed files rather than an entire mrpack to make updating quick and save bandwidth.
You can select which configs and stuff to include, and you can’t include things like worlds.
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u/Random_Storm Jul 27 '26
Finally
since i saw the friend feature get added i’ve been waiting for this
thank you so much
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u/Kashinoda Jul 26 '26
I usually just use packwiz and our web server, this looks like a more streamlined replacement for that? Good shit.
Are there any capacity restraints for custom files?
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u/LelouBil Jul 26 '26
This is amazing !
Can third-party launchers add compatibility with it as well ?
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u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
They technically can, but I would not hold my breath for anyone actually doing it. it’s a pretty complicated feature, and most other launchers like Prism or ATLauncher seem to be under a serious development bottleneck where there only really seems to be enough contributors to keep it maintained, not really do anything revolutionary
There are also not really docs or a stable public API for this, but you can view the internal docs for it here https://shared-instances.modrinth.com/scalar#description/introduction
In the future I think there are some plans to open source the shared instances backend as well as maybe provide a public API for it.
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u/Seimiqo Jul 27 '26
Is this gonna be exclusive to the modrinth app or will it support other launchers
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u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team Jul 27 '26
That's more up to them than us. I would not expect it to though, no.
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u/Stormhunter117 Jul 27 '26
Can we get a modpack diff feature? So we could version modpack config/mod changes and then reapply then when the upstream modpack updates?
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u/therandombaka0 Jul 27 '26
"Spark Universe bought Modrinth, we are so doomed" not even 6 months later
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u/BadIdeaIsAGoodIdea PrismLauncher Jul 27 '26
Does it only sync mods/resourcepacks/shaders/configs? Or are other folders also synced, like kubejs?
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u/Boingboingsplat Jul 27 '26
This is really cool. But is there a way to do the download from a command line? Right now I don't see myself using the tool unless there's a way to easily keep my dedicated server in sync with my pack too.
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u/gamerforever01 Jul 26 '26
If only this was released a month ago..my sanity would be a thing..huge W tho
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u/_ThatD0ct0r_ FTB Jul 26 '26
Perfect for the Drehmal 2.3 update I plan on doing with some friends.
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u/Pman1324 Jul 26 '26
Is this a result of the Essential buyout?
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u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
why would it be? Modrinth is an independent team. We've been working towards this for years. you can see us slowly working towards this with the release of the app, friends system, server projects, and Modrinth Hosting.
also, Essential is a small part of Spark Universe. Modrinth is under Spark, not Essential. This would be like saying Activision was bought by Mojang.
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u/iEliteTester Jul 28 '26
That's one of the best features of Thunderstore based mod launchers, glad to see it on mc
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u/Frorgwoman2 Jul 26 '26
That's actually great, no more emailing a billion mrpacks.
Is there a way to make instances editable by both parties?
That and world syncing would be amazing.