February 4, 2025

In my ever-continuing quest to play the weird, the niche, the obscure, and the oddly-platformed, I've been playing a lot of Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition in the last few days.

It should not be as competently done as it is. I also didn't expect an active modding community that has streamlined the game to amazing lengths.

The mods aren’t as robust as Minecraft Minecraft, but considering the platform in question, it’s pretty amazing.

The base game has a lot of charm, being stuck in 1.9 with a lot of old mechanics and textures. The controls are fine, though limited by the 3DS in some ways. The main issues are the functional limits of the game, namely loading speeds, saving speeds (no background saving here), and some framerate issues.

The main mod to use is the Modernization Megapack, which updates textures and titles, imports the iconic Mojangles font, bug fixes for several glitches and optimization issues, and really improves load and save speeds. Totally overhauls the GUI and HUD, adds some mobs in via mod support, etc etc. There’s definitely some that I’m forgetting, too.

I highly suggest checking it all out! If you have a hacked 3DS, you can download the game using hShop and then install mods from the 3DSMC UniStore on Universal Updater!

hShop also has all the update data and DLC downloads, and Universal Updater has an app that installs the DLC to properly activate it, so go ham with that~!

~ Alex Amelia Pine