Megacraft Classic

Years ago, CK was casually playing about with a plucky little game called Minecraft. It was around release 1.2, the update that introduced Jungle Biomes, a maximum world height of 256, and Iron Golems, thus kicking off TangoTek’s long-running rivalry with the Mojang developers. CK though, he was kinda bored. His favorite block, the hopper, wouldn’t be released until version 1.5, so in the meantime, he diddled about in creative mode in a game that he felt was kinda intriguing but also kinda pointless.

To amuse himself, he started swapping graphics around, starting with the explosion animation from the 8-bit Mega Man games. Eventually he started looking for a complete Mega Man-themed resource pack, but couldn’t find one that was complete or even made sense with what little it had accomplished. What’s the logic behind having large energy pellets be flowers instead of food items, he wondered? Also, simply cutting and pasting 8-bit graphics from the games looked awful, with the harsh black lines and colors. Adapting a 2D action game to a 3D atmospheric game is not an easy project at all, not if you want to do it right. It requires a lot of thought and work, a lot of pixel-by-pixel editing as you change color palettes and modify tiles so they look good not just from one camera angle, but from every possible camera angle. Since CK had been continuing to turn random blocks and mobs into Mega Man equivalents and didn’t have the skill to mod Commander Keen’s pogo stick and neural stunner into the game, he finally decided that he would go all the way and make a Mega Man resource pack himself.

Megacraft Classic was originally mistaken for Rooster Teeth’s Megacraft video series a number of times, but untangled itself from that and lasted longer, all the way until it hit a brick wall with the release of Minecraft 1.13: The Update Aquatic. That particular update changed a lot of features under the hood, requiring resource packs to undergo a lot of file editing before they would work. That was a huge problem for Megacraft Classic because it wasn’t merely a Mega Man-themed pack; it had a humongous amount of animations, randomized textures, and extra functionality that together was nigh impossible for one guy with a short attention span and a demanding career to port over. Thus the project died, much like the entire branching Mega Man franchise itself did after Keiji Inafune quit Capcom.

But CK did not then go on to kill his own career like Inafune tragically did for a while. He did a whole bunch of other stuff instead until a couple fans of his work sought him out, asking him to revive the pack. Boy did he need the help too, because Minecraft is a game that endlessly updates, that is forever adding new content. In the game’s early days, with its limited content and customization options, creating and managing a resource pack was a simple one-man affair, but now it almost requires a team effort.

Here are the contributors to the Megacraft Classic team.

VelveteenVixen stabilized the pack, converting all the 1.12 assets over to 1.13 so work could begin on content updates. She left the team early on, feeling that keeping pace with Minecraft’s updates was too much work, but her work was critical to reviving the project.

Visorlights has contributed a lot of sprites and tiles. He’s much better able to handle busywork than CK is, so they often collaborate with CK making parts and animations that Visorlights then assembles into multiple randomized textures, which is how the pack got over 40 kinds of kelp. He’s added power level indicators to redstone dust lines and given all the slabs, stairs, walls, and fences the organic textures of their respective blocks, but the big thing he’s responsible for are all the custom models that allow lecterns to become Brain Breaks and sea pickles to become Scworms.

Xenothekid reached out on Reddit and has done a little bit of everything, from updating the pack’s custom language file to turning dripstone into 50 different kinds of deadly spikes. His miscellaneous contributions help CK make final decisions about assets.

Yeah, that’s right, this resource pack comes with a custom language file: English (Mega Man). You have to manually activate it in the game’s language settings though. When you do, it’ll change the names of many of the blocks, items, and mobs, plus spice up the death messages and make things overall more immersive and less boring.

There’s also a big pack of custom music. Minecraft lets you combine resource packs, so just activate Megacraft Music along with Megacraft Classic to get 500 megabytes worth of classic music playing in your Minecraft world. This does not include the music for the records you can collect in-game though. Those count as items, so they’re part of the main resource pack.

The music had to be spun off into its own pack because it bloated out the size of the main packs too much, but that also means it will work with any version that isn’t below 1.7, even if the game itself says it may not work. The syntax for custom music is one of the few things that HASN’T changed throughout the game’s updates.