DO NOT Download Minecraft Mods From These Websites…

What if I told you that you probably downloaded a stolen Minecraft mod at least once if not many times throughout your time playing Minecraft a mod taken from its original Creator stolen by Anonymous users who reek the monetary benefits and that’s if you’re lucky because if you’re not there’s a good

Chance you’ll be downloading malicious malware or other harmful files but you aren’t the only one who has unknowingly fallen victim to the roughly 600 or so websites breaking in millions of dollars from their illegal activities with even bigger YouTubers having showcased them in videos as they have become so

Mainstream that they appear extremely high up on Google searches it’s not surprising that they have been involved in illegal activities in the past as well and recently even curse 4 which has been allowing mods to be stolen prompting some sizable drama as it was one of the last safe websites left for

Mod creators Minecraft mods are being stolen in plain sight it’s been happening for over 10 years and nothing has been done about it all right though hold up you may be thinking how exactly have I downloaded stolen mods and do I have a virus well let me show you

Something we are going to search up just a simple phrase Minecraft mods and if we scroll down a few searches above Planet Minecraft there is a website called Nine Minecraft if we search the phrase download Minecraft mods the fifth result is tea launcher alright what about Minecraft optifying 1.19.4 the newest

Version at the time of this video and look at the second result it’s from a website called Minecraft shader.com Minecraft fabric download the third result second of which is actually relevant to the search is nine Minecraft again and many many other Search terms also all have high ranking search

Results all leading to similar sites now you want to know what all of these websites we’ve just mentioned and the many more we haven’t come across have in common all of them are re-uploading other players mods Maps resource packs data packs and anything they can create illegally profiting off the ads they

Place in front of download words and litter across their site and that’s if you’re lucky if you’re unlucky you could potentially be downloading dangerous malware and files as the download sources are provided by the website creators not the original Mod Creator some of these websites have existed for

Over 10 years now making millions off of the back of stolen Minecraft mods they did not have permission to upload and the majority of the Minecraft player base is none the wiser so you might be asking now the Mr Epic how do you know which websites are legitimate or not and

What exactly is going on here well to answer that we have to go back to 2014. you see in 2014 with Minecraft booming in popularity and almost every YouTuber making videos about various Minecraft mods the Minecraft modding Community reached the boiling point mods were being stolen left right and Center

Websites like curse Forge were not as popular yet so many websites and even YouTubers were re-uploading mods to their own sites it was an utter free for all a post was made to the Minecraft forums by user called squid titled list of sites stealing Minecraft content stop

Mod repos in the thread cool squid discusses the many issues with these sites and why they are problematic being one of the first to bring this issue to the public lives you see the first issue is that none of you guys are subscribed to the Mr Epic if you want to help

Spread the message about mod reuploads be sure to subscribe no pressure of course anyways course could created a Firefox Opera and chrome add-on which would block the websites listed here asking the community to report any side stealing mods they come across so they could be added as well stop mod

Repost.org was also created a website containing a list of roughly 580 different websites all confirmed to be reposting mods on each website there is also a series of notes about the site for example the website cursefire.com is attempting to copy and trick people into thinking it’s curse Forge the majority

Of these sites are in it purely for the money and probably aren’t doing anything malicious to them I’d say still but a selection of these websites have been confirmed to include malware or other harmful files in many of their mod uploads or contain sketchy links to other websites which could be harmful

It’s pretty obvious why this is problematic consider you are a new or inexperienced player diving into the world of Minecraft mods for the first time you proceed to download a mod and then get a virus not only is your PC in trouble but it also gives the original

Mod and its creator a bad name as now you may believe that the mod Creator intentionally put harmful software in there and this is one of the primary issues with Mod reposting it’s the feeling of finding your work on other people’s sites where they could be doing things you can’t control that are

Harmful or malicious that badly reflects on you as the mod author or mod Creator cool squid provides a good example here imagine you spent months of Blood Sweat and Tears creating a book and the day after you publish it you see it in a bookstore without your permission with a

Big 9 book logo on it then you find out that nine book is also taking all the profit from your book sales how would you feel as a small independent mod Creator this is especially problematic in the Minecraft modding scene where most mod create haters already don’t

Make that much money relying on the little ad Revenue they get or donations to get by when these mods are stolen and re-uploaded the Creator gets neither as a mod reuploader probably isn’t going to include a link to the mod Creator’s patreon or other donations it’s a

Gigantic slap in the face to the passionate and dedicated modders who already don’t have it great and is incredibly demotivating but that’s far from the only issue now the reason many of these mod re-upload sites such as nine Minecraft are able to rank so highly in searches

Is due to their blatant lies and deception these sites often re-upload mods listed as versions which don’t exist yet for example back in 2018 when Minecraft 1.13 released and it was taking up the final few months to update many of these sites falsely claim to have downloads for the 1.13 version of

OptiFine which are obviously not real or just rename jars in some circumstances now obviously legitimate websites aren’t going to have Pages for mod versions which don’t exist yet so if an unknowing user was curious if OptiFine was out for 1.13 and Googled OptiFine 1.13 it was likely that these sites came up first

This is a common problem for a lot of mods which either don’t support certain versions or stop being updated as it leads to players thinking that the mod is broken or the dev is lying you obviously then go to complain to the mod author and of course frustrate them

Furthermore since many of these repost sites don’t actively update mod Pages many of the mods they host are very outdated and have bugs and issues which are fixed later on this of course once again leads players to gain a negative perception of the mod author often complaining to them and understandably

Is incredibly annoying for the mod Creator who actually has put effort into maintaining the mod and fixing the bugs only for the wrong versions to still be downloaded that all begs the question though how do these sites still exist today considering what they do is illegal how have some of them continue

To function and make millions of dollars for a period of over 10 years well as many mod creators will tell you many of these websites exist in countries such as Russia and similar where it’s very hard to pursue legal action while dmca complaints have been sent by mod authors

Many times they are rarely successful long term most of these sites such as nine Minecraft will send an apologetic email taking down the mod data pack resource pack or whatever and mentioning that they won’t repeat such an offense before wishing them what authors good health and a good job how wholesome but

Then they will go ahead and re-upload the same mod again or republish the same webpage only days later now to their credit and from my discussions with modern resource pack authors some websites will take down mods once requested and will not re-upload them but those are in the minority and

There’s a good chunk such as the russian-based websites which won’t even consider the dmca and will simply ignore the email and take down requests entirely yeah not great this is very common by the way it doesn’t only happen to the big mods I made a Twitter post

And had a decent number of developers mentioned the same thing and at best they were able to get the re-upload sites to link to the official curse Forge page instead but that’s far from an ideal situation this is especially common amongst Bedrock add-ons as well

Of which are stolen just as much if not more than Minecraft mods and re-uploaded to many other websites without any of the original Creator’s permission this is not just a Java issue resource packs worlds data packs mods add-ons everything and everything that can be made by a Community member is stolen and

Hosted on these website against the original Creator’s permission throughout this video I’ve mentioned one particular mod reupload website many times and that is nine Minecraft nine Minecraft is probably the most known of the mod reupload sites being featured in YouTubers videos ranking very high on many Minecraft search related results

And existing since 2012. in fact it’s so well known that there are many mod reupload sites that have even tried to copy its name two trick users into thinking they are the actual 9 Minecraft which is hilarious in its own regard now I got into contact with star mute from

Stardust Labs a Minecraft development team who have made many dialer packs and other creations you certainly have heard of before Star mutus had experiences with trying to get Stardust Labs Creations removed from websites such as my Minecraft and has learned some things about them nine Minecraft is run by

Vietnamese owners and has been since 2012. every time star mute has tried to get one of their team’s Creations removed with the dmca complaint they just hide the mod page and then unhide it again about a month later one of the owners of the site is suspected of being

Involved in some forms of crime in the past with them posting this image of them holding a large sum of 100 bills in front of what seemed to be some sort of dodgy credit card fraud related site we don’t really know anything beyond that though starmute estimated that nine

Minecraft has made upwards of two million dollars throughout its time of operation likely much more the reason they rank so high on many searches is also due to their staff being extremely proficient at Google SEO starmute also discovered that at one point a while ago

One of the staff or now former staff of stop modern repost actually had admin access online Minecraft as for why nobody he knows and the details surrounding this situation are scarce and Starmie believes that user was exonerated but we don’t know for sure I would not be surprised in the slightest

If nine Minecraft and other similar websites come from a background of other crime especially after investigating tea launcher a few months back I’d advise you all to think twice about the next time you go on such sites so after all this what do mod creators do where do

They upload mods that can make money and are safe well as a rule of thumb in the modern Community curse Forge mod rinth the mods official GitHub and in unique circumstances the mod’s own website are generally the only locations mods are hosted with the author’s consent but

Even that might be changing soon as well curse Forge is by far and large the biggest Minecraft modding related websites and has been for quite some years now with mods being downloaded hundreds of millions of times from them I’m sure you guys all know what sodium and Iris are performance and Shader mods

Which go above and beyond OptiFine basically essential for some players to even play the game at all well recently the official Iris Twitter account would post on Twitter that curse Forge was turning a blind eye to a legally re-uploaded versions of sodium in Iris that’s right other malicious individuals

Were re-uploading sodium and Iris on curse Forge of all places potentially littering them with malware and stealing Iris and sodium’s revenue curse Forge upon being contacted did not take them down doubling down and mentioning that the uploads are legal due than what’s being open source and mentioning they

Would only step in if it was an explicit legal issue which is also not true at all according to Ira shaders if you have an open source mod as of a few days ago anybody can now upload it to curse Forge and there’s nothing the original Creator

Can do curse Forge is now seemingly allowing people to do the exact same thing these dodgy re-upload sites have been doing for years brief update which occurred as I was editing this video curse Forge did end up listening to iris’s complaints and banned re-uploading others work however Iris

And sodium will not be returning to curse Forge and it sets an odd president that they only listened after receiving public backlash even after doubling down at this point it seems the number of valid sources mod creators can upload their mods willingly to is decreasing and with the potential to make money

From re-uploading other users Creations the number of these Shady reposting websites will only just keep increasing the stop mod repost website hasn’t been updated in a while and many new sites have popped up now the issue is only growing I hope you enjoyed this video be

Sure to subscribe thank you all so much for watching