John Siracusa had a epic rant on that exact topic on ATP #25 ( http://atp.fm/ ). I myself was baffled to find out that modding involves unpacking a JAR file, overwriting .class files with modded ones and packing the whole thing back up. Disaster.

Why is this a disaster? My 10 year old son has been doing this for years without any problems. It has encouraged him to start poking around other game parts and learning lots in the process.

Edit: There are also many easy to use front ends for adding mods and working with different minecraft versions etc.

* Because you can only run one patch at a time.

* Because your patches only work against one version of the game.

* Because you are directly updating files, so both of the previous restrictions can easily be violated, which tends to cause a crash on startup.

The front-ends work around this lunacy by keeping multiple clean copies of the entire install, at multiple version levels, so that each mod can trash it on its own or use the version it needs.

Hell I'm baffled to find there's no server tools to automatically update a server (or even set it up to run autonomously). There's a bunch of hacked script files and screen... That's about it. Given The money they've made from this, it's a bit silly.

You'd be surprised; that's how most games server software works actually. For example, running a Source Dedicated Server works in exactly the same way (as does pretty much everything else). After years of dealing with that I did in fact eventually write a Web app that wraps servers like that and makes them Internet accessible. You can check it out here:https://github.com/lelandbatey/veiled

I had the pleasure of being a full time game server admin for about 4 years, running servers for Australia's biggest ISP. I still have the mental scars of dealing with game server software. The company I worked for built a wonderful tool for managing the servers called gamecreate: http://www.gamecreate.com/

There's no way I could have single handedly managed the 500+ game server instances with out something like that.

As an aside, if you've never had to deal with any of the CoD series servers count yourself very lucky. I think it was still a requirement for CoD3 that the windows dedicated server required directx installed..... just so it could show the splash screen.

Wow, that's just... I have no words for that. I thought the recent SteamCMD not playing nice with TTY's was bad, but just... whoa man.

Wow, great answers! I'll check these out, thanks.

That's not how modding works nowadays. See Forge, Bukkit and/or MCPC.