RadioCraft is a mod to enable simulation of ham radio in the Minecraft game for players with the mod installed. We envision game players being able to build and operate a variety of radios on HF and VHF, with customizable antennas, and realistic simulations of propagation, QRM and QRN, diurnal solar effects, and band conditions. Eventually we'll be able to simulate the full range of ham radio activities including phone, CW, APRS, VHF repeaters, and even fox hunting.

Lucas is also creating a companion mod called “AnotherWeatherMod” which adds severe weather systems, localized weather, and forecasting tools to the game. Mods like this already exist, but many are abandoned, and creating a new option from scratch allows it to directly integrate with the RadioCraft mod for things like APRS weather, WEFAX weather forecasts, and lightning damage on radios.

The RadioCraft mod also directly connects with other popular mods that are compatible with ForgeEnergy to make it fit well in existing modpacks. It also has direct compatibility and functionality with the create mod. The entire project is open source, with the main mod under a GPLv3 license, and the weather mod under an MIT license (this was required as some assets from other MIT licensed mods were used).

Our goal is for this mod to become a popular addition to Minecraft players and in technical modpacks to increase awareness of the amateur radio hobby, and to provide a safe space to experiment and “play” with radio before getting licensed.

• January 2023: Hired developers and began work.
• February 2023: First radio designed.
• March 2023: Voice chat operational. Performed a successful stress-test with over 100 radios in a gaming environment.
• April 2023: Proof of Concept complete. Began artwork design and development.
• June 2023: Beta software released to field testers.
• August 2023, 2024, and 2025: Presentation and public demonstration at the Northeast HamXposition, Marlborough, MA
• September 2025: Radiocraft was moved from Forge to NeoForge as a modloader as the Minecraft modding community moved this way, breaking much of the code and requiring a lot of rework
• October 2026: Radiocraft development picked up heavily, and is nearing it’s 2.0 Alpha release, the first fully game-ready version of the mod.

First, you’ll want to make sure your system can handle Minecraft. It’s strongly recommended that your system has a GPU. It doesn’t need to be anything crazy, anything stronger than say a GTX 1050 will get you by, and worse hardware will be okay too, especially if you install optimization mods. CPU wise, you can get by with most relatively recent CPUs. Recent Macs work well. If you’re not sure, you can send an email here and we'll review your PC specs and let you know how it should run. The game will also want some RAM. We recommend a system with at least 8GB, although 16GB is the norm these days.

There are plenty of guides on how to install vanilla (un-modded) Minecraft available online, as well as guides on how to set it up for mods. However, instead of just pointing you towards one of those, we can walk you through setting it up with a program called Prism.

Prism is a modern fork of an earlier tool called MultiMC, and allows you to have numerous “profiles” with different version of Minecraft, modloaders, mods, and other customizations without losing your original install. Visit the wiki on a guide for settng it up.

This video guides you through your first play-through of Minecraft.

This video talks about Minecraft Redstone, an advanced feature of the game that is kind of like electricity in real life, but also really not. This video is a great intro to it, although if you’re new to the game you should get a feel for the basics before diving into Redstone.

One note on the above video: Redstone torches won't burn out if they’re turned on and off too often, but will burn out if they are turned on and off too rapidly for an extended period of time.