This is a continuation of FlowerChild’s Better than Wolves total conversion Minecraft mod. Its aim is to both recapture the feeling of that first time you played Minecraft, hiding in a dark hole on your first night with monsters all around, as well as extending gameplay by creating a deep tech tree that lets you slowly master your surroundings, as you craft windmills, kilns and crucibles and eventually reach steel production.

How old is BTW?

The first version of BTW was released April 9, 2011, 13 years ago by its original author, FlowerChild, a game industry veteran. He’s not around anymore, but we keep the vision alive.

Why is it named Better Than Wolves?

The mod started as an exercise of making features that were high bang for the buck. At the time, Notch had started to implement wolves as a feature, even though pets are very expensive in development time. FlowerChild made a forum thread talking about how there are easier features to implement, like Hoppers, Redstone Lamps, Minecart Boosters, Dispensers, Cauldrons, and Observers (yes, all those features originated in BTW). He decided to ask the community for features like this and created the mod of things to add that would be better than wolves.

What is Better Than Wolves - Community Edition?

FlowerChild said goodbye to the mod on April 09, 2021, at the 10 year anniversary. He opened the source to the community and a team was formed to update the mod and fix some of the lingering bugs. It ended up being a long journey that included integrating MCPatcher and moving over to Fabric for addon development.

Why is the mod for v1.5.2?

Originally, FlowerChild felt like he had to take out more features in 1.5.2 than he kept, so he decided to stay on one version of Minecraft and save the humongous effort of porting to new versions. The Community Edition, however, has programming reasons to move up to newer versions to get some of the new engine features. Therefore we currently have an alpha for 1.6.4, the first BTW update in so many years! The eventual plan is to move up to 1.8.9, which is before a lot of the harder to deal with changes, but is a really stable version for Fabric. Along the way, there will probably be a reworking of terrain gen in 1.7.10. We hope you’re along for the ride!