August 22, 2023 (Last Updated: June 20, 2025)by Lauren
Hi everyone 👋
With recent events like the CurseForge attack fresh in people’s minds, we’re seeing more users than usual becoming aware of what they’re actually downloading! We’ve always worked hard to ensure the safety of our users, but we also want to hear your concerns and make sure that you feel safe using Essential Mod 💙
Auto-Updates Are Now Opt-In
Although a lot of people enjoy the convenience of auto-updates, we know the importance of having control over what you download. We’ve been working on resolving this for a while, and are happy to finally announce that our latest update turns auto-updating off by default, and makes it opt-in only, so you can choose what works best for you!
We are working on more resources on platform safety.
Open Source Initiatives
We’re taking steps to expand our open-source initiatives! Currently, we publish the libraries and tools we use to build Essential Mod, including Elementa, a declarative GUI library for Minecraft; UniversalCraft, a library for creating mods across multiple Minecraft versions; Vigilance, a configuration GUI library built using Elementa, and the Essential Gradle Toolkit, a Gradle plugin providing various utility methods and common code required to set up a multi-version Minecraft mod.
1. Open source Essential Loader
The Essential Loader is a multi-stage piece of software responsible for loading and updating Essential. It’s long been our goal to contribute this to the community and we feel that to maintain our safety and transparency goals, a license very similar to GPL-3 is the most appropriate. This license will permit the community to modify, use, and distribute the loader, as long as changes to it and mods that utilize it are also open source. We will make the full details of the license public when we publish the source code in the coming weeks.
The Essential API provides various utility methods and libraries to help developers make mods more easily and quickly. Utilization of the Essential API always requires Essential Mod to be loaded alongside. We want to make the Essential API available for developers to use and integrate, and the LGPL-3 license grants permissions for the community to use this API in closed-source software if it remains unmodified.
Update: The Essential API has gone source available alongside the Essential Mod. As the Essential API is intertwined with the Essential Mod itself, and serves no purpose other than letting other mods integrate with Essential Mod features, we decided that it does not make sense to open source it separately.
Essential Mod Source Availability
We also hear your requests for more transparency. We’re working towards the high level goal of having the source of every line of code we run on a user’s computer be transparently available.
At this point, our next step is to make Essential Mod source-available. There will be a public Essential Mod repository on GitHub where all changes will be pushed to in a single large commit each time a new Essential version is released to the public.
To assure you that you can trust the code that ends up on your machine, all Essential JARs we publish are built from the public Essential Mod repository. We are implementing a deterministic build system that allows anyone to build the Essential JAR from the public repository to see that it is byte-for-byte identical to downloads available on our pages, with matching checksums to verify.
Although Essential Mod will be source-available, users and developers will not be free to modify the contents in any manner or take pieces/assets from it for personal or commercial use.
