Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I will re-review after my son has had a couple of months experience with this. First impression, though, is not overly positive. This course is for an old (1.6.4) version of Minecraft, and a very old (JRE 1.6) version of Java. This caused hours of confusion and problems on my son's first attempt to start the course. You need to download Eclipse (a heavyweight Java development environment), which is slow, and when he started Eclipse per the video instructions (provided by a happy/chatty guy that my son seems to like but I find insufferable) was greeted with a blizzard of errors. This brings us to Tech Support. There is no phone support -- zero, zilch, nada. If you want support, you can send them a message (not an email -- only through their online system), and maybe you'll get an answer the next day. When you do get a reply, it is likely to say -- no matter how much detail you provide up front -- please send us a copy of your Mod. Well, we didn't even get that far, so sending them a copy of their own software seems pointless, except as a delaying tactic, but sure. Maybe on the second or third day my son might get an answer. Suffice it to say that my son gave up and started playing with Lincoln Logs, which don't require tech support. Now, I'm a programmer, so I got involved at this point. After some sleuthing, I found that our Java was the most recent (and secure) version, but Mod Design requires the old (and insecure) 1.6. After downloading and installing that (required Admin rights!), I uninstalled the software, re-downloaded and installed it, and discovered that it also prefers an older version of Minecraft (the older 1.6.4 version rather than the new 1.8 version which my son has been playing for several months). This also needs to be hunted down and installed. Of course, in order to run multiple versions of Minecraft you also need to create distinct profiles, which is another learning experience. Honestly, I would have a hard time recommending this -- at this price! -- to anyone who doesn't have a parent in the house who knows how to interpret Java errors, download and install obsolete software versions, and generally is pretty familiar with software development.