Porting to Other Versions & Loaders
History Stages is All Rights Reserved, but there is one carve-out: you may port it to another Minecraft version or another mod loader without asking first. You still have to follow a few conditions, and this page walks through them in plain terms.
The exact wording is Section 3 of LICENSE.txt — that text is what counts if this page and the license ever disagree.
Why this exists
The mod only ships for the versions the maintainer actually plays and tests on. Everything else — older versions, newer ones, loaders that aren't covered — would otherwise sit there unreachable, and a mod nobody is allowed to move forward quietly dies with its last release. The port exception is the way out of that without handing the whole project over.
What counts as a port
A technical port is the same mod, running somewhere else. You rewrite the parts that the target version or loader forces you to rewrite — registries, events, mixins, rendering, networking — and the mod behaves the way it does in the official version.
Anything else is not a port:
- New stage types, new lock categories, new blocks, new GUIs
- Removing or reworking features because you'd rather they worked differently
- Rebalancing research times, drops, or costs
- Bundling it into a larger mod of your own
None of that is forbidden forever — it just needs to be agreed first. Ask on Discord or in a GitHub issue before you start building, not after.
The three conditions
| What you have to do | |
|---|---|
| 1. Stay a port | No features, content, or gameplay changes beyond the technical adaptation. Bug fixes that a version difference forces on you are fine; new behaviour is not. |
| 2. Say hello | Before or when you release, contact the maintainer (Discord or a GitHub issue) and give access to the port's full source. On every platform you publish on, set the license field to a custom license that links to your port's license file. |
| 3. Stay public and credited | The port's source stays publicly available. It ships an unmodified copy of the original license (e.g. as LICENSE-ORIGINAL.txt) plus your own port license from Appendix A. Every project page — and the in-game credits, where the port has them — names History Stages as the original mod and links to the official repository. |
A port that meets all three can be listed as a verified port on the wiki and on the official CurseForge, Modrinth, and GitHub pages, so players find it from the main project instead of by luck.
A port that doesn't meet them isn't authorised, and falls back under the normal "no standalone forks" rule.
Your port's license file
You don't have to write legal text yourself. Appendix A of the license is a fill-in-the-blanks template — copy it into your repository as its own license file, fill in the bracketed fields, and keep an unmodified copy of the original license next to it.
The template layers two copyrights on purpose: the original mod stays with Flix100000, and the code you wrote to make the port work is yours. The terms themselves stay the same as the original, so a port can't be used to relicense the mod into something more permissive by going around the back.
A note on platform license fields
Both CurseForge and Modrinth have a real Custom License option, separate from their "All Rights Reserved" preset. Use the custom one and point it at your port's license file. The ARR preset reads to players as "no permissions granted at all", which isn't what either the original or your port actually says.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or your plan sits somewhere between "port" and "own mod", just ask before you invest the time: