[Forricide]

Many people still run on older modded versions. To use the example you gave, HarvestCraft 2's CurseForge page[0] says:

> Welcome to the brand new HarvestCraft for 1.14.4 and beyond! Please read carefully as this is NOT a update of Pam's HarvestCraft but a re-boot.

1.14.4 is 3 years old, but many (many!) servers are still running on 1.12 or older versions if doing modded. There simply isn't an incentive for many mod owners to update their mods to the latest version, so the "community updates" as a whole are generally quite slow and people end up stuck on their favourite version.

Edit: Looking at the article, they also only analyze Forge mods. On newer versions, other mod loaders are gaining popularity, whereas Forge is the de-facto mod loader for 1.12.

[0] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/pams-harvestcra...

[tetha]

Additionally, as far as I know, after 1.12, the development of minecraft paced up and a lot of internals of minecraft changed. This turns the update of mods past 1.12 into a complete rewrite most of the times, which has burned out quite a few authors.

[Forricide]

This is correct yeah, there's a lot of effort involved in porting mods to newer versions. Larger mods slowly move in that direction, but at the end of the day even now people are playing modpacks from 1.12 because there simply aren't equivalent ones in newer versions (with the same set / feel of mods)

[Filligree]

> There simply isn't an incentive for many mod owners to update their mods to the latest version

There is quite a strong incentive. What there is not, is means — Forge and Minecraft have both changed dramatically between versions, to the point that many mod developers throw their hands up in the air and rewrite the mod entirely. For something complex enough that that isn't an option, for instance Electrical Age, it's easy to remain stuck on an older version forever.

There's no documentation, and the API owners often assume that forcing a complete rewrite of major parts of the mod is fine. It's really not.

[NelsonMinar]

It's a miracle that the Minecraft mod scene exists at all. The old MCP project that made tools to decompile the obfuscated code to something readable and then recompile it again was just the most remarkable hack. I guess that's years out of date now and I vaguely recall Microsoft was more open to supporting mod authors in recent years. But I guess from this discussion it's still kind of a mess.

[MertsA]

How sad is it that Microsoft is more open to supporting game mods than Mojang when Mojang promised a modding API was just around the corner for years and owed a lot of their success to the modders they seemed to spite.

The funny thing is that before the buyout (and maybe after, I don't know) Mojang's DRM was an abysmal failure. They'd obfuscate their Java binaries in a vain effort to prevent cracks but every cracked version out there would just patch the launcher and run the game unmodified. Cracked launchers would run updated versions just fine and when Mojang actually tried to check for a cracked launcher within the game itself they had a rash of false positives triggering on actual paying customers and nothing but a minor road bump for the pirates. The only thing obfuscating the game binaries did was force MCP to put in a mountain of effort to building the tooling and mappings to deobfuscate it so that mods could be developed. The entire MCP project should not have even been necessary. All this for some crappy attempt at obfuscating their binaries that never even worked against pirates in the first place.

At least a silver lining is they finally have data packs and command blocks.

[bombcar]

Some mods are also forever stuck at a given version as the source isn’t open and the mod author doesn’t want to port, is missing, or has died.

Thaumcraft 4 is a big example.

[rcxdude]

To throw in another reason why old versions are still popular, a good chunk of modded players use modpacks, and some of the more popular ones are pretty highly polished collections of mods with a bunch of glue to make them work together as a somewhat unified experience. This can't really happen until the mod ecosystem for a given version has already stabilised a fair amount (and can only happen on versions for which a large number of mods are available, which tends to be every 5 releases or so).