Vanilla² is shutting down!

I've decided to shut down Vanilla Squared, there are a variety of reasons for this, which I will go over in this article. First and foremost I want to say thank you to everyone who downloaded and played the Mod.

The Main point is that I've recently gotten back into Unity game development, which has been a lot more fun then modding. You see, one thing I haven't really bin truly honest about is that basically the entire mod is a product of AI. I know you might have a different view on it then me, but in my opinion I did make this mod because even though AI wrote the code, it was still difficult to figure out Ideas and get the AI to actually do what I want it to do. But thats not why I decided to quit Minecraft modding. The main point is the development cycle, let me lay it out to you on how it looks for me:

1. Choose a Feature that I already planned beforehand to implement.
2. Write a prompt thats longer then the Bible to implement. (Not actually, but the prompts get really long sometimes)
3. Play some other games while I wait for the AI to write the code.
4. Test it out after ~1h of waiting time.
5. Tell the AI what it did wrong.
6. Wait 15m.
7. Tell the AI what it did wrong and argue this time with the AI, hoping it figures out the bug.
8. Wait 15m.
9. Repeat until there are no bugs.
10. Push to GitHub.

• everytime the game restarts, wait 1-2m for the game to start ;-;

Repeat for the next feature. And it gets worse, because you probably should be done with your feature, before Mojang releases their next drop. I'm not saying its Mojangs fault, but whenever a new Version releases, I need to tell the AI to recode everything. Making it basically impossible to code anything yourself because it needs to be recoded every few months anyways, even if the code before that was completely fine. It's not like I even have a chance to properly learn java, because coding yourself is just inefficient and too slow. Now yes I don't have to update to every version immediately, but if I code manually, I'll lack behind on releases on Modrinth and my Mod will eventually fall behind new updates, making it even harder to update the mod. Because the older the supported version, the more recodes, and those recodes get more complex with every update you miss too. I mean there is a reason some mods are just stuck on some versions. I also just don't have the time to manage both my irl life and this Mojangs mess. And it just gets worse, because you don't even know what Mojangs code does, because there are no docs(not like its even possible to make docs) so you would have to manually read the thousands of lines of code first. So what if I would just use an API, well first of all not everything can be solved with already existing APIs, you also have to learn the functions of the APIs your using. And what if they refactor or the developer behind the API quits, all the knowledge you just learned for that API has been undone and you need to find a new API.

Now this was fine until I got back into Unity where I noticed how much better the development cycle is. Not only do you have an already existing engine and documentation, you also have a editor to make development just better. And there are also no wait times for starting your game, sure in some cases the Scripts have to reload(which takes like 30s btw) but clicking play in the editor takes 0s to startup the game(Assuming you disabled "Reload Domain and Scene on play", if not its still shorter then the waiting times for Minecraft, which btw increase the more APIs you add).

The second reason on why I decided to quit modding is due to the insane hatred towards AI, don't get me wrong I hate AI slop, but in my opinion vibecoding is just the next step in evolution. Because if you use it right, then you can get really good results out of it. Issue is that most people don't use AI correctly and just open up chatgpt or claude in their browser, tell it like: "Implement me a cool op ah weapon that has some cool AOE effects and deals a lot of damage", no balancing, barely any testing. The AI will give a result, but just a really bad one. And thats AI slop. In my opinion the issue is the usage of the new tools, rather then the new tools themselves. Now I don't think I would have been banned from Modrinth, like I don't think they even have enough Moderators to check every single projects GitHub and find definitive evidence of the entire Project being AI. Especially when the project is already on Modrinth. And what if the Mod has obfuscation/is closed source. In Unity, there are definitely a lot more things you can easily do yourself without AI. And the codebase also doesn't update every few months. On top of that the old code will still work because they deprecate the old stuff. Minecraft obviously doesn't do that because they update everything, which is good for the game but not for developers.

You might hear from me again in the feature, although not related to Minecraft this time.

So with all that said and done, goodbye.