I highly recommend you read this article on the version treadmill as it is important to understanding the issue at hand. This will be a more chaotic post since it’s my first, and I’m not the best writer. I hope to improve upon it in the future.

I am also currently working on another blog post with more research that may take longer, but it will have suggestions for improvements and discussion of COLTS’s potential effects.

Addendum: since the new version format has dropped, I feel like this is no longer as much of an issue now that mods can confidently say they’ll port to “27.1” or “28.4” or “yy.1” annually providing an easy porting schedule.

One last thing: do not harass anyone. We are here to change the atmosphere of modding, not destroy lives.

The Problem

Every update, Mojang disenchants Minecraft mod developers with what we modders have come to call the treadmill. Being a version labeling and servicing issue, the treadmill has caused immeasurable harm to the cohesion of the modding ecosystems that form around each Minecraft version, but part of the issue lies in version semantics. What the versions mean and what they contain has been lost as we have transitioned from the pre-1.16 1.major.minor era to the post-1.16 1.major.refactor era to the post-1.21 1.21.major Drops era, so to say that the modding community should pick a version and make it stable is antithetical to the goals of the wider modding community. Fundamentally, SMV (Standard Minecraft Version), COLTS (Community LTS), and other attempts to standardize the popular modding version are creatively bankrupt as they tend toward maximizing download count and modpack cohesion for the few modders who have a stake in the decision rather than naturally enhancing existing ecosystems on older Minecraft versions or establishing new ones on newer versions. What is most alarming is the bias for a specific crowd of developers. If these standards are “community-driven”, why is there a tendency for bias in the spaces and audience by which these votes and discussions are held?

Bias

These movements have been biased from the get-go (e.g. SMV and initially COLTS). This is often criticized, and it further exemplifies the kind of idea that people have about these movements being for the “elite modders”. Exclusive groups have always existed in Minecraft modding ever since the early Forge days, and 2025 is no exception. Even today, these groups remain partially secluded from each other, often only known about through word of mouth, but when we are deciding important standards and when drama runs rampant in the modding community, it becomes near impossible for the modding community to agree on anything. And because spaces like the Fabric Discord disallow drama discussion, these smaller secluded spaces spread rumors and drama like wildfire. Therefore, it is important that we as a community have open discussions about these topics in an effort to dispel misinformation and displace harm. To add insult to injury, new modders will inevitably be confused as to why there is a standard Minecraft version, but more often than not they will be unaware of it. If we can’t agree on anything useful without fights and gossip, why should we expect newer modders to accept these arbitrary decisions, let alone know about them?

Motive

Modding is an art form, but some people don’t see it that way. There are three increasingly large rifts forming between sections of the modding community: the old guard, contemporary modders, and for-profit studio and YouTube modders. However, the division between the old/contemporary modders and the so-called YouTube modders is more noticeable. Typically, these YouTubers will claim to fix an issue with Minecraft or that Minecraft used to be better. Of course, there is no real creative motive in these endeavors as they coincidentally follow viral content trends as well as common misconceptions that “Mojang are lazy” or that “Minecraft needs to be fixed or saved by modders”.

So it’s clear that the grand majority of these popular update-slop YouTubers are not acting in the community’s best interest, but surely the old guard are, right? Not necessarily. Sometimes nostalgia takes over a person’s opinions and they begin saying that things were “better in the old days”. I don’t think this is productive, and some of the hate and condescension toward newer versions, their users, and newer loaders sometimes comes from these people. However, a vocal minority like that is inevitable among a group of modders who have seen the horrors for years. Even still, the sentiment that old versions of Minecraft are better than the current ones remains popular among this group which may explain the kind of people in favor of COLTS. Given that discussion and voting being exclusive to that group has been criticized, movements like COLTS have toned down their language and opened voting to a wider audience, but maybe we’re letting too many people vote.

Letting Players Vote: A Feedback Loop

Addendum: It has come to my attention that the COLTS version is decided by mod developers. I will admit, it could have been worded clearer, but some of the points below may still hold, especially regarding general player influence, and also since their votes are seperate but (implied to be) public.

When you let players vote—people who have little to no experience modding or making modpacks—it becomes sorely obvious that they will choose the versions that have most of their favorite mods. In turn, this creates a positive feedback loop in which players—ignorant to Minecraft’s internals and the difficulty of supporting specific versions—pick the popular versions, influencing the versions mods support, and then affecting the versions players pick. This is no way to run an informed vote of a standard that would greatly impact what versions most mods would be available on, especially when the arbiter of the standard is presented as an authority. Hell, the standard probably shouldn’t be a standard. This is a glaring vulnerability in the system, and I hypothesize this is because they want versions like 1.21.1 and 1.20.1 to be the chosen standard Minecraft versions.

Just Pick A Version And Run

I don’t think COLTS or any of these standards are a good idea because they may inadvertantly stratify and antagonize people in the already fracturing modding community. They serve as nothing more than an authority on whether the player is justified in bugging you to backport or forward-port. The only benefits that could be gained would come from accurate community insight complete with carefully gathered statistics, not a “standard modding version” because believe it or not, each Minecraft version has its own little niche! So reasonably speaking, the only reason this standard exists is to dubiously ascertain (or more accurately dictate) without nuance where the downloads and money go. If you don’t care about downloads, just pick a version and run with it. If you do, find the most popular version or whichever you prefer, but if you are a big mod developer or modpack creator, leave the entitlement to a specific version at the door. Ultimately, Community LTS will not fix nor alleviate the root issue of Minecraft versions: semantics and velocity of change. If you stand in opposition to COLTS, go vote 1.21.9, 1.21.8, 1.21.5 or something similar here, and call them out everywhere that you have a relevant audience. The end goal is to influence their decision making enough that they reconsider the viability of a standard Minecraft version. It is important that we don’t forget: when we mod, we should intend to create art, not solely products.