Getting started

Creating your modpack

The first thing you wanna do with pax is choosing a location where you will store your modpack. Download the latest release of PAX from here (if you're on Windows, download pax-windows.zip, on Linux download pax) and create a new folder where you put the contents of the zip file (on Windows) / the binary (on Linux).

On Windows, your directory structure should look like this:

yourcreatedfolder/
├── cacert.pem
├── libcrypto-1_1.dll
├── libcrypto-1_1-x64.dll
├── libssl-1_1.dll
├── libssl-1_1-x64.dll
└── pax.exe

And on Linux, it is supposed to look like this:

yourcreatedfolder/
└── pax

Depending on whether you'd like to start fresh or already have a modpack you'd like to edit, there are two actions you can take:

• If you want to create a new modpack, execute the ./pax init command.
  • Pax will ask to confirm your action and to choose your modpack name, the name of the author, the modpack version (can be any version number, for example 1.0.0) and the minecraft version (the version this pack is compatible with).
  • Pax will ask you whether you want to use Forge, Fabric, or Quilt.
• If you already have a modpack you'd like to modify, execute the ./pax import <file> command.
  • Replace <file> with a location to your .zip file, for example ./pax import C:\Downloads\All_The_Mods_6.zip.
  • For importing, only .zip files in the Curseforge modpack structure are accepted. .zip files that contain complete minecraft profiles or *.jar files are unsupported.

Regardless if you chose initialization or import, this is what your directory structure should look like now:

yourcreatedfolder/
├── modpack/
│   ├── overrides/
│   └── manifest.json
└── pax (or pax.exe under Windows)

If you've opened or unzipped a modpack from Curseforge before, you've surely noticed that pax's directory structure in modpack/ is completely identical to theirs. Pax is designed to be easy to use with the existing Curseforge structure, which means that even if the ./pax export command fails or the sun goes dark, you would still be able to manually create your modpack by zipping the contents of the modpack/ folder.

How to go from here

Pax has a comprehensive command reference viewable by ./pax --help or ./pax <command> --help.

• If you want to list/add/remove/update mods, check out Managing mods.
• If you want to add config files or datapacks to your modpack, drop it into the overrides/ folder. For example, if you want to set a custom Botania config, you would drop the botania-common.toml into modpack/overrides/config/.
• How one can export their modpack is explained on the Export page.
• If you want PAX to automatically upload your modpack to Curseforge, read about Automatic releases.