Notch has today made a few posts on his Tumblr blog The Word of Notch about a possible way to allow a mod API.
When talking about a mod API, Notch revealed it was the best way the team at Mojang had come up with to support mods.
What they want it to do will be:
* Let players sign up as “mod developers”. This will cost money (edit: no longer costs money!), and
will require you agreeing to a license deal (you only need one per
mod team).
* Mod developers can download the source code from our SVN repository.
As soon as we commit a change, it will be available to all mod
developers, unobfuscated and uncensored.
* Mod developers get a unique certificate for signing their mods. This
means players can see who made what mod and choose to trust individual
developers. The cost of signing up makes sure only serious developers
have access to this certificate.
Notch revealed that he hopes “this means people will do awesome new things with the Minecraft engine and play around with it.” He went on to add that Mojang may “want to buy and/or license good mods” and to clarify that “Because of overwhelming feedback, the cost of the mod api access will be 0 dollars.”
So it’s more good news for Minecraft fans it sounds like the mod API is on its way. Unfortunately at the rate it is going it probably won’t make it into Minecraft beta 1.6.