Launcher, Auth, Threads, Oh My! Modrinth Features, Ready to Fly

We're changing the modded Minecraft landscape with the new Modrinth App, alongside several other major features we've been working on the past few months.

Emma Triphora
August 05, 2023

The past few months have been a bit quiet on our part, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working on anything. In fact, this is quite possibly our biggest update yet, bringing the much-anticipated Modrinth App to general availability, alongside several other major features. Let’s get right into it!

The Modrinth App

Most of our time has been spent working on the Modrinth App. This launcher integrates tightly with the website, bringing you the same bank of mods, modpacks, data packs, shaders, and resource packs already available for download on Modrinth.

Alongside that, there are a wealth of other features for you to find, including:

The Modrinth App

Full support for vanilla, Forge, Fabric, and Quilt
Full support for Windows, macOS, and Linux
Modrinth modpack importing, either through the website or through a .mrpack file
Modrinth modpack exporting to the .mrpack format to upload to the website or share with friends
Importing of instances from a variety of different launchers, including MultiMC, GDLauncher, ATLauncher, CurseForge, and Prism Launcher
The ability to update, add, and remove individual mods in a modpack
The ability to run different modded instances in parallel
The ability to view and share current and historical logs
An auto-updater to ensure the app is always up-to-date
An interactive tutorial to show you through the core features of the app
Performance through the roof, backed by Rust and Tauri (not Electron!)
Fully open-source under the GNU GPLv3 license

More features will, of course, be coming in the future. This is being considered a beta release. Nonetheless, we’re still very proud of what we’ve already created, and we’re pleased to say that it’s available for download on our website right now at https://modrinth.com/app. Check it out, play around with it, and have fun!

Authentication, scoped tokens, and security

The second major thing we’re releasing today is a wide range of changes to our authentication system. Security is a top concern at Modrinth, especially following recent events in the modded Minecraft community when several individuals were compromised due to a virus. While Modrinth was not affected directly by this attack, it provided a harrowing reminder of what we’re working with. That’s why we’re pleased to announce three major features today that will strengthen Modrinth’s security significantly: in-house authentication, two-factor authentication, and scoped personal access tokens.

In-house authentication and two-factor authentication

The new Modrinth sign-in page

Until today, Modrinth has always used GitHub accounts exclusively for authentication. That changes now. Starting today, you can now connect your Discord, Microsoft, Google, Steam, and/or GitLab accounts to your Modrinth account. You may also forgo all six of those options and elect to use a good ol’ fashioned email and password. No problems with that! (If you’re curious, we store passwords with the Argon2id encryption method, meaning we can’t read them even if we wanted to.)

The “account security” section of your user settings

Two-factor authentication via TOTP is also now available. If enabled, new logins will be required to enter a TOTP code from an authenticator app.

Additionally, any time a change is made to the security settings of your account, you’ll now get an email to the address on file. With this change, emails are now required to have a Modrinth account.

You can change your authentication settings on your account settings page.

Scoped tokens

If you don’t use the authenticated subset of Modrinth’s API, this is probably not of any interest to you.

Before today, Modrinth’s API used GitHub tokens. These will still work for the time being, but this method of interacting with the API is now deprecated in favor of Modrinth personal access tokens (PATs). PATs can be generated on your account settings page.

There are 21 available scopes that can be placed on a PAT, which can be found on GitHub. Certain scopes cannot be placed on a PAT, such as deleting a user account, and must be performed through the Modrinth frontend. If you try calling a route without the proper scopes on a PAT, you will get a 401 error.

For more information about the authentication system, please refer to the API docs.

Threads

The third big feature for today are threads. No, not the Instagram thing—our own thing. Before today, communication on Modrinth between moderators and users has been difficult, with most topics having to resort to Discord. This is no more! With the introduction of threads, reports and moderator messages are no longer one-way. When you submit a report to Modrinth, moderators will now be able to reply directly to you in a thread.

The interface of a report thread

Likewise, when a project gets submitted for review, moderators can now communicate directly to you in a thread, and you can reply back in the same thread.

The interface of a project thread

Dashboard and notifications overhaul

And now, a couple extra little bonus features. Along with this update, we’ve also done an overhaul of the dashboard and notifications pages to make them generally cleaner and easier to use. From the dashboard, you can view your active reports, followed projects, and notifications, in addition to the existing revenue and projects pages. Notifications for the same project are also now combined to avoid clutter.

TOU/Privacy Policy/Rewards Program Changes

Finally, we've made some changes to our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and how creator monetization works on Modrinth. Here's a brief summary of major changes and why we made them:

Terms of Use: Mostly rewritten to better address nuances on our site and remove vague language.
Gaming Content Section (TOU): This section groups project files into a different category on Modrinth and gives us less rights over creator's files (which is more favorable to creators).
Privacy Policy: We added some changes to be more compliant with the GDPR and the CCPA. We have also added some additional data that we collect (project playtime in the app + usage analytics) with the latest update for transparency.
Rewards Program Terms: We've made an agreement governing the Rewards Program on Modrinth to have a clear written agreement to protect us and creators from unnecessary liability.

We've also made some small changes on how monetization works to accommodate the launcher and be more fair to creators. Here's a quick summary:

In-app downloads are now counted with an equal weight for page views (this was mainly done for downloading projects from search + modpacks)
Previously, creators received 80-85% of the site's ad revenue since we earned revenue search + user profile page ads. Now, creators receive a fixed 90% and our cut is only 10%.
The 20/80 payouts split for modpacks and the projects inside of them for page views has been removed. The modpack creator now gets the same revenue that the author of any one mod in the pack gets.
We've worked out new advertising deals which will lead to increases in creator revenue.

Read more about how this system specifically works on the CMP Info page. We are always reevaluating payout distribution to make it the most fair for all creators!

We'll also be sending a notification to all users with an email on their Modrinth account so creators can be informed of these changes.

That’s about it! As always, join our Discord for support. Feel free to also follow us on your preferred flavor of microblogging for smaller updates and memes: Twitter/X, Mastodon, Bluesky, or Threads.