So, as promised, here’s an explanation of The Abomination and why it is the way it is.
The Abomination started probably 5 or 6 years ago as a custom version of All The Mods 6 on 1.16.5. I started with ATM6 and just kept bolting stuff on, tossing in basically anything that looks vaguely interesting. I have a particular interest in nature/animal mods and furniture mods, so it’s focused on those. I’ve been limping the abomination forwards year by year, generally not moving to a new Minecraft version until all the biggest names have updated. I’ve been on 1.16.5, 1.18.2, and currently living on 1.20.1. It’s gonna take an act of god to get me past 1.20.1 especially as the modding scene has fractured so heavily over NeoForge (XKCD competing standards comic). I’ve used all sorts of crazy methods to maintain *roughly* the same mods since 1.16.5, it’s kind of a ship of Theseus at this point as so many mods from 1.16.5 no longer exist and so many things I had now didn’t exist then, but I’ve honestly tried to keep most of the same stuff.
Minecraft is written in Java, which people who have a better understanding of programming than me routinely point out is just not an amazing language to program a game in. One of the quirks it picked up from being written Java is that it - like one other game I can think of which engages in this insane methodology (✨cities skylines✨) loads *every block in the game into RAM on launch.* To be clear, that’s not every block like every dirt block - anyone who’s played Minecraft will know that whatever wizardry it uses means the performance is unimpacted by the volume of placed blocks - but every UNIQUE block. The more unique blocks you have - if you’ve played and you know what this means, think everything you can see in JEI - into RAM. The more unique blocks, the more RAM you need.
Vanilla Minecraft can run on the potatoest of potato machines, partly because it only has something like 200 or 250 unique blocks (I may be way overshooting that number I’m estimating right now). Every mod you add that adds blocks adds to Minecraft’s ram consumption.
The Abomination started its life with around 300 mods - mostly what was in AMT6 - and I could more or less get it running on 12 gigs of allocated RAM. As it’s grown over the years this number has increased, but the core of the abomination, as massive as it is, will still get off the ground with ~16 gigs allocated without too much trouble.
The primary culprits to the situation in which I currently find myself are two mods which do dynamic asset generation - Every Compat and Paladin’s Furniture. Dynamic generation in Minecraft is a coding trick that mods can pull to procedurally create blocks and assets on launch based on other available blocks. This allows a mod using dynamic generation to, for example, guarantee that a piece of furniture or adds will be available in every wood type, including modded ones, in every hypothetical player’s game by dynamically generating those assets at launch based on every block with the #wood tag and using the already existing textures, instead of the programmer of that mod having to manually create every asset for every wood type they know of which would inevitably leave out someone’s mod somewhere and creates other compatibility problems.
Every Compat generates every imaginable wooden item in the game in every wood type which exists in the game. Paladin’s Furniture does the same - generating a version for every wood, and actually several others - block type in the game of a broad set of furniture pieces. This means that having these two mods present massively increases the number of unique blocks in a pack - a single new wood type creates a full Paladin and Every Compat set, so it creates a couple hundred new blocks every time.
Because I also play with the REST of the utterly obscene situation happening here, including Silent Gear (many, many wood types) Biomes O Plenty & Biomes you’ll go/gone (another ton of wood types), Dynamics, etc etc etc, there are hundreds of wood types in my game. And Every Compat & Paladin’s Furniture dynamically generate sets of several hundred blocks a piece for each of them. The situation rapidly becomes exponential.
The last count I saw my unique block types were in the hundreds of thousands - I think it’s either 200,000 or 600,000, I don’t remember - and my JEI is close to 2,000 pages long. The massive RAM needs are entirely because of this obscene volume of unique blocks. If I remove just those two mods - every Compat and paladin’s furniture - the RAM needs PLUMMET.
The reason this makes everyone so angry is that there’s very strange misconception in a lot of Minecraft technical support communities that no Minecraft save will ever, no matter what you do, need more than 4 GB of ram allocated (already patently false as the newest All The Mods packs don’t launch well with less than 8), that assigning more than that amount of ram is absolutely never necessary, is always stupid and wrong, and will break your game, and that an error that says “you don’t have enough ram assigned” can somehow actually magically mean “you have too much ram assigned” if you have more than 4-6 GB allocated. I have played and tweaked and tested the Abomination at length, and I know for a fact that it needs the amount of ram I feed it because, what do you know, if I give it less it won’t launch and it tells me very clearly that it won’t launch because I have don’t have enough ram allocated, and as soon as I give it what it wants it suddenly starts working again. However, everyone else literally thinks I am either stupid or lying about this, so it is literally impossible for me to troubleshoot, discuss, or seek help for any OTHER problems with this modpack in any public Minecraft space. As soon as they see how much ram is allocated to it they start yelling at me that no Minecraft modpack has ever or will ever need that much ram, that I’ve broken my game by allocating that much ram, and that having that much ram allocated is the cause of it running poorly and I need to assign it 4 GB instead of 40 and it’ll surely run better. I then explain to them that that’s not possible because it literally won’t boot with any less and tells me very clearly that it’s because it doesn’t have enough ram allocated, but somehow “the game continuously tells me that it doesn’t have enough allocated ram until I give it this amount, at which point it stops giving me that error” STILL reads to everyone as “well it must be telling you that because you gave it too much ram and if you just keep giving it less you’ll stop seeing the error that says it doesn’t have enough.” It absolutely baffles me, and it’s entirely down to this weird conception that Minecraft NEVER needs more ram no matter what (this is very common on Reddit) despite that just…not being even sort of true.
There ARE problems with assigning Minecraft massive amounts of Ram due to what Java calls garbage collection, which is a whole other uber-complex can of Minecraft worms, but I have a mile long string of slightly customized Java launch arguments I stole from someone on Reddit that keeps my garbage collection situation under control. But nonetheless it makes people Extremely Angry, so i basically have to simply play it in solitude, troubleshoot it (and its ever growing, extremely plentiful, errors) myself, and explain it in deep detail to anyone who wants to know about it to head off them yelling at me.
I’ll post some more technical details on it tomorrow including my shaders, JVM args, actual mod count, etc, tomorrow.
But I’m gonna post this poll because it’s gonna be fun as hell
You’ve read all of the above. The Abomination WILL NOT launch without 40-44 GB of RAM allocated to its JVM profile. It is absolutely unplayable if you do not have 64 GB of ram in your computer. Bearing that in mind, is there anyone out there with a computer that can actually run this bitch that would like me to upload a ZIP file of the abomination so you can at least try to play it
Yes bring that bitch on
I am not touching that with a 10 foot pole
Clicky clicky button
Voting ended onDec 4, 2025
I can try to yank out the Compat mods mentioned above and try to get it back to 12-16 GB territory as well and upload a version like that if there’s any interest.
