Getting started

Creating your modpack

The first thing you wanna do with pax is choosing a location where you will store your modpack. Create a new folder and drop your downloaded version of Pax in there (get the latest release here), so your directory structure looks like this:

yourcreatedfolder/
└── pax (or pax.exe under Windows)

If you're on Windows, you also might want to download the SSL certificate from here and drop it into the folder next to 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).
  • If you want to create a Fabric modpack instead of a Forge one, you can append the --loader fabric argument to your command to automatically install Jumploader.
• 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.