In short, I took it down.
People have assumed it was out of pure rage, a "hissy fit".
Others assumed some kind of legal issue with Thaumcraft.
I've even heard one crazy theory that curseforge took it down for having "craft" in the name. Something about curse no longer allowing mods to have that?? idk doesn't matter.
All Wrong. Mostly.
Before I give my reasons, lets delve into the deep lore that is this mod and how it became to be.
Believe it or not, I've had the concept and lore for this mod since 1.3, before I even knew what Minecraft mods were.
Come 1.4, friends and I discover bukkit.
With bukkit we discover some kind of custom npc plugin, dont recall the name.
This is where things come into shape. Me as a bored teenager at the time with terrible creativity starts to build with my old ideas.
I created this decently sized area in the sky accessed via connected nether portals.
By 1.5 I had created a story driven path, an adventure, towards a castle full of bad puzzles and talking NPCs.
These NPCs started off with just Herobrine. That's right, the cringe lord himself.
1.6 rolls around, enter Aether II.
Aether II, the only mod we had, we all enjoyed it so much I ended up incorporating it into this whole mess.
This birthed Zol and Dol. Zol governed the aether while Dol had the overworld. Herobrine had the nether of course.
Xia was birthed during this time as well, we needed someone for the void afterall.
It was 1.6.4, the only mods we had experienced were Aether II, Thaumcraft 4, and QCraft.
So my knowledge of mods, and the community for that matter, was limited at best.
However I wanted to make this story a reality.
I had prior programming experience under my belt, years worth, although it's all webdev! Functional programming. In fact, PHP and MySql was considered modern back when I was actually doing webdev.
So I had no prior Java experience and extremely limited OOP experience. I messed around with C++ in the past but it was some 2001 edition of visual basic, and even then I only messed around for a few days at best.
Right, so I start getting my hands dirty. Quickly I come to find that I dont know what im doing. I'm smart enough to think to myself: "Hey, maybe let's step back and learn the language?"
I went on to develop a game using Graphics2D and learned a lot from the experience. I also threw in netty to learn networking, at which point I got online multiplayer working too. (One day I switched over to lwjgl to learn opengl but that was years later)
Maybe one day i'll return to that project. Anyway we're off topic.
Point is, there's a lot of really REALLY bad code in Voidcraft from my early days of programming and I'd rather people leave me alone about already.
Now we've got content, a working dimension (no idea how I pulled that off so quickly honestly) albeit it was a flat out nether copy with minor edits.
I began to use this mod to simply learn new things with modding while adding little random things we all wanted as friends. This included copyrighted music tracks I tossed onto music disks. This isn't a problem however as it never made it to the first public release. Here's the kicker, it exists in the git history.
If you haven't noticed by now, for those who've used the mod anyway, it's full of random junk that makes no sense.
Random machines. A Jukebox. Some other crap I don't even recall anymore.
This was a testing ground, my first mod.
1.7.2 rolls around, port complete for me and my friends.
More useless content.
1.7.10, We decide to release the mod. I was excited. Today? I regret this.
I at least knew there were some legal issues making this unprivated, however my idiot young self shrugged a lot of it off as "eh who cares? It's just a Minecraft mod."
As a result only the music discs got removed. If I recall.. I'm pretty sure I ended up adding even more after release. Don't quite remember.
Not only that it's full of stolen textures from other games. Terraria for example.
Legal issues really aren't why I took it down. It just helped me reinforce the fact that I should take it down.
What REALLY drove me to take it down.. is it's just cringe worthy. Come on.. Herobrine??
This project isn't even what I envisioned. It's not what I wanted. It was a mess.
Even with my so called "overhaul" plan, "Dal Quor", that too is just unoriginal content. I'm obsessed with dream based stories.
Dal Quor is nothing more than the Plane of Dreams from D&D Eberron. Again, unoriginal.
I want something to call my own. I can still use my old ideas from 1.3->.5
Minus Herobrine.
I want to forget this first disgrace was ever brought upon the world.
This reason, and the fact there are legal issues, is why I'd rather people remove their forks of the mod but that's out of my control.
Something to call my own. That's what Voidscape is. It's my vision from the very start, cleaned up from my matured self. Original content.
There's just one problem. I've lost motivation.
Modern modding just doesn't feel the same anymore.
Not sure if i'm just losing interest or i'm just not happy with how the community behaves now.
Or maybe it's just my lack of time from being an adult. No longer a kid with massive amounts of time to just program all day every day.
Not the end of the world however, I do get random motivation boosts here and there.
I do genuinely want to finish this project, but it's going to be a journey to get there.