Written by
TheNuclearNexus:
## Last Year in Summary
Happy new year, *2 months later* 😅. As Smithed boots up again for 2025, we wanted to address the community and discuss some things we have planned\! 2024 was a **dynamic** year here at Smithed. We doubled our discord community alongside getting to put together one of the coolest events any of us have had the pleasure of working on\!
### Smithed Summit
As I’m sure the majority of you all reading this article remember, the Smithed team put together one of the most exciting events of the year, the inaugural Smithed Summit convention\! It was a 1 week mash of the entire Minecraft creator community including data packers, map makers, and more, all conveniently accessible from a Minecraft server. During Summit, you were able to interact and explore 50 unique booths that hosted various experiences, showcases, and more and attend more than 15 live panels that talked about in-depth topics such as worldgen, shaders, and more. Due to its *smashing* success, it has had a **deep**, positive impact on Smithed and its future. We created an experience that led to **1.3 thousand** players spending a cumulative **6 months** of in-game time on our server – which is just unbelievable\!
After Summit, the team needed a much needed rest which has led us to need to play a bit of catch up on a couple of post-summit tasks, namely the **Summit Map** release and the cleaned up panel videos. We hope to release the map soon while the videos will be uploaded as they are completed (first one should be out shortly after this article's release\!)
Looking forward, **Summit** will become an annual-ish event that will represent the apex of what the community has to offer. We will strive to make each event bigger than the previous and will share details as we get closer to the next one, *which is not any time soon ;).*
### Platform Growth
Overall, 2024 was a good year for the Smithed platform. Our audience size doubled; we now serve 300k requests a month and garnered 22.7k impressions in the last 6 months\! That is compared to 1.8k in the first half of 2024\. However, the sheer number of requests and views doesn’t translate to content on the site, so how did we improve in that regard? Well, packs on the platform almost doubled from 2023, which is fantastic (thank you, Gamemode 4).
Congratulations to our top 5 most downloaded packs last year:
1. **The Creeper’s Code** by CreeperMagnet\_
2. **Dinos & Dodos** by Ragno
3. **Standard Skyblock** by BluPsychoRanger
4. **Sky Void Additions** by BluPsychoRanger
5. **SkyBlock Advancements** by Epyon
## Major Goals for This Year
### Modrinth Integration
Lots of stuff is on the agenda for 2025, starting off with a feature we showcased last month, **Smithed → Modrinth integration**\! You’ll be able to leverage Welded dependencies on Modrinth and a smooth upload process from the Smithed editor, but we understand a lot of new users aren’t keen on letting Smithed drive the interaction. So, of course, going the other way will also be possible. You’ll be able to import a Modrinth project and update it one-click on Smithed. As a stretch goal, we’d love to have Modrinth → Smithed be an automatic process.
Bundles will also get some love this year, with Modrinth data packs available in the Bundle editor. You’ll be able to create bundles with all your favorite packs both Smithed and Modrinth, and share a simple link with your friends so they can get the resource pack. No more having to upload a million zips to the Weld site yourself\!
### Bundles
One of the hallmark features of the Smithed platform were bundles which was our opportunity to collect the best packs from our community and package them as a clean experience, akin to modpacks\! At Summit, we teased our plans for our first bundle, which was Smithed Airborne. Due to the ever changing features being developed for data and resource packs, we found a lot of the critical data packs needed to make Airborne work are in a transitional period to upgrade the newest features. Therefore, we decided to delay Airborne for a future date, and instead pursue a new bundle, **All of the Packs**\!
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/VVJxW2o.png" style="image-rendering: pixelated; width: 8rem;"/>
ATP will be a fairly flexible bundle that will contain as many packs as possible from the Smithed website to define a normal world and will include a standard quest tree to guide players on exploring data pack content. This should be a much more straightforward experience that creators can target and should allow us to dive into the opportunity bundles provider before we take on more niche projects such as Airborne in the future\!
### SMP
To showcase the new bundle, All The Packs, we will be launching a new SMP on March 1st\! The SMP will be similar to the one we did in 2023, regular survival Minecraft with data packs. The server will have ATP before it’s officially out on the Smithed website, so be sure to explore all it offers.
