PJ Franke’s Forging Onward: A Curated Leap into Minecraft 1.9 Modding
When Minecraft 1.9 arrived, the modding community wasted no time breathing new life into the combat update. PJ Franke’s Forging Onward modpack captures that early excitement, bundling a hand-picked selection of mods that felt stable, fun, and ready for both single-player and server adventures. Instead of throwing every available mod into a folder, this pack focuses on cohesion—traditional favorites, clever storage solutions, and quality-of-life tweaks that make the 1.9 experience feel polished rather than experimental.
What’s Inside the Pack?
Forging Onward brings together over fifty mods, carefully chosen to avoid crashes and incompatibilities. The author notes that some mainstream mods were intentionally left out if they refused to load reliably in both SSP and SMP environments—Blood Magic’s early 1.9 version, for example, had issues that kept it from the final list until it was truly stable. The result is a lean, dependable collection that still manages to cover magic, tech, storage, building, and countless tiny improvements.
Core Mod Highlights
Tech and Magic Foundations
The pack leans on several heavy hitters that defined the era. Tinkers’ Construct lets you forge custom tools and weapons from a smeltery, while Botania (ported to 1.9 by a community member) adds a full flower-powered magic system. Psi provides programmable spellcasting, and RFTools opens up dimension building and advanced machinery. For those who enjoy darker rituals, Blood Magic eventually found its footing and joined the roster. Together, these mods create a world where you can tinker, automate, and enchant your way through any challenge.
Storage and Inventory Revolution
One of the pack’s strongest suits is its storage lineup. Storage Drawers offers compact, visually clean bulk storage, and Colossal Chests gives you multi-block containers that grow with your hoarding habits. Refined Storage brings a modern digital network for items, while CompactStorage and QuantumStorage provide alternative solutions for different playstyles. Add Inventory Tweaks, Inventory Sorter, and Just Enough Items (JEI) into the mix, and you’ll never lose track of a single cobblestone again.
Quality of Life Enhancements
Forging Onward shines in the small details. JourneyMap gives you a full-screen minimap and waypoints, while Neat displays health bars above mobs. Fast Leaf Decay clears out those floating treetops instantly, and NoNausea disables the portal wobble effect. Crafting Tweaks lets you balance or clear the crafting grid with a button press, and Morpheus enables server-wide sleeping when only a percentage of players hit the bed. Mods like Ding, Death Counter, and Login Shield add subtle polish without overwhelming the vanilla feel.
Building and Aesthetics
Creative builders will appreciate Chisels & Bits, which lets you carve individual pixels from blocks for unprecedented detail. Quark adds a host of small, vanilla-friendly features—from colored item frames to improved dungeon generation—while Underp Hangables and Colorful Stars let you decorate with hanging banners and customize your night sky. Iron Chests and Just Another Crafting Bench round out the building tools with upgraded storage and alternative crafting stations.
Getting Started with Forging Onward
The modpack is available for manual download from its official CurseForge project page, where you can grab the files and drop them into a fresh 1.9 Forge instance. If you’d rather skip the manual tinkering, the foxygame.net launcher provides a modern, flexible way to install the pack—simply search for Forging Onward in its modpack browser and let it handle the rest, including automatic mod updates and seamless mod menu downloads. This makes it especially handy if you plan to jump into SMP with friends, as everyone can sync their setups effortlessly. Once launched, you’ll find that most mods work straight away in both single-player and multiplayer, though it’s wise to check the included ModLister for a quick overview of what’s active.
Conclusion
PJ Franke’s Forging Onward captures a unique moment in Minecraft modding history—the early days of 1.9, when creators raced to update their projects and players were eager to explore new mechanics with familiar tools. The pack’s careful curation means you spend less time troubleshooting and more time building, fighting, and automating. Whether you’re revisiting the combat update with fresh mods or discovering these classics for the first time, Forging Onward delivers a stable, feature-rich playground that still feels cohesive years later. If you crave a balanced 1.9 experience that respects your time and rewards your creativity, this collection is well worth the download.