2025 Serverside Summer Results
2025 Serverside Summer Modjam Results
The Serverside Summer Modjam, the first NeoForge jam, has ended and all entries have been reviewed fully.
Unfortunately, we did not get as many contestants as we would have liked: only 16 entries. But this is our first NeoForge jam and it proved to be a valuable learning experience for us, to ensure that jams in the future are easier to jump into for all of you. We have gathered all this information in the Learned Lessons section farther down.
Results
Here is the list of winners that have met all the requirements, ordered by how much each of these mods impressed our judges.
- Better Shulkers
- Inventory Chess
- Immersive Magic
- Cellworld
- Villager Brain Config
- Slayer Quests
- Sever Side Horror
- Scalar Summer Structures
- Custom Entity Leveling
- Behind You!
- World Dimension Nexus
- Considerate endermen
- Mass Resource Interchange
- Tiny Tasks
All the winners that opted in to prizes and that meet qualification standards will be contacted over the next few days through Discord DMs to arrange the logistics.
Unfortunately, we had to disqualify some entries as they did not meet all the requirements of the jam:
- TileFinder - Not legally open-source: the license file in the repository is missing and was not added in a timely manner after our notification.
- I Will Keep These Items - Not serversided: clients without the mod will fail to connect.
Thanks to everyone who participated! We hope you had fun while writing these mods and that some of these mods will be a welcome addition to both your and your users’ servers!
Learned Lessons
As mentioned previously, this was also a big learning experience for us, as we have identified various issues that have lead to friction, confusion, and a much lower than expected amount of entries for this jam. Therefore, these are the key takeaways and ideas that we would like to explore for future jams:
Simpler and Broader
The goal of this jam was creating mods that could be ran on the server only. Mods of this kind are quite tricky to create, as they incur many limitations, require clever workarounds, and out-of-the-box thinking. Beginners have to contend with both a difficult code base and what is an advanced mod topic. This makes it even harder for them to jump into the jam. We will consider simpler topics and themes for future jams, that both beginners and advanced modders can have fun in.
At the same time, the pace at which Mojang is releasing new versions is speeding up. Limiting the jam to a single version such as 1.21.1 only can be limiting as players and modders are chasing latest versions. For the future, we will consider allowing larger range of Minecraft versions such as “1.21.x” or “1.21.4 and newer”.
Shorter and Better Planned
We have noticed that a jam that lasts for two months is counterproductive because it leads to modders procrastinating and scope creeping (such as making plans too big that can be reasonably achieved in the target time frame). The timeframe of this contest also overlapped in holidays, finals, and other deadlines that drew people’s attention away from the contest.
Therefore we want to try and host shorter jams. We think that the length should be no longer than two weeks, and ideally we would limit it to between three and four days.
More Curated and Clearer
When we announced the jam for the first time, we had planned for 30 winners and a prize of $150 each. This was done because we expected many more people would join the contest. The high amount of winners also produced some logistical issues on our side. Also, we still had to get in touch with some contestants and disqualify some mods over requirements that were not met due to confusion and lack of clarity.
In future jams, we will try heavily reducing the amount of winners. To compensate for the increased competition, we will also increase the value of the prizes for winners. We will also look into adding a pre-jam signup to gauge interest so that the jam will begin only if there are enough contestants or if changes needs to be done to the the contest’s theme and/or requirements.
Finally, we will look into having clearer rules that are less ambiguous, to avoid any confusion for the jammers. We also want to try and provide a checklist or some other mechanism that allows modders to verify whether they abide by all requirements prior to the submission deadline.
We would like to thank all of you for the support, and happy modding!