Modrinth Enhanced
The Modrinth App, without advertising, without telemetry, and with offline and Ely.by accounts, a skins browser and tons of fixes for Linux.
Everything else is deliberately left alone. This repository holds no forked source code — only a series of patches that are applied to an upstream release tag, built, and published. Whenever Modrinth ships a new version, the patches are reapplied on top of it, the result is built and checked on Linux, Windows and macOS, and a release is published automatically if it all still works.
What changes
| Patch | What it does |
|---|---|
0001-Rename-the-app-to-Modrinth-Enhanced |
Product name, binary name, window title and version label. |
0002-Remove-advertising-and-... |
The sidebar ad slot, both "Upgrade to Modrinth+" prompts and the ad cookie consent prompt. The ad webview is never created. |
0003-Remove-telemetry |
PostHog analytics, Sentry crash reporting, the Tally survey embeds, and the playtime and server-play reports the launcher sends to Modrinth. |
0004-Add-offline-accounts |
A way to add a Minecraft account that never contacts Microsoft or Mojang. |
0005-Make-the-sidebars-foldable |
A switch for the Modrinth Servers button, a news section that folds away, and a title bar button that folds the right sidebar away. |
0006-Add-Ely.by-accounts |
Sign in with Ely.by, launched through authlib-injector. |
0007-Sign-in-to-Microsoft-in-the-... |
Microsoft sign-in happens in your own browser instead of a webview, so your password manager works. |
0008-Round-the-window-corners-on-Linux |
The undecorated window gets rounded corners on Linux. |
0009-Scroll-with-the-middle-mouse-button |
Middle-click autoscroll on Linux and macOS, as browsers do it on Windows. |
0010-Manage-Ely.by-skins-from-... |
An Ely.by account's skins can be picked, uploaded, switched between models and deleted on the skin page. |
0011-Show-every-player-s-skin-... |
Players who have a skin show it on offline-mode servers, and skins can be put in a folder by hand. |
0012-Launch-a-running-instance-... |
A running instance can be started again on another account, with a console per copy. |
0013-Explain-what-went-wrong-... |
The Logs tab says what a crash was and offers a fix where there is one, without a connection. |
0014-Browse-skins-from-... |
A Browse tab on the skin page: Ely.by's catalogue in the app, and NameMC, laby.net and crafty.gg in a window. |
0015-Use-the-desktop-s-file-picker-... |
File pickers on Linux are the desktop's own, such as KDE's, through the XDG desktop portal. |
Offline accounts
"Add offline account" sits next to "Sign in to Minecraft" in the account card. It asks for a username and nothing else.
The player UUID is derived exactly the way Minecraft itself derives it — an MD5 name UUID over
OfflinePlayer:<name> — so worlds keep the same player data when they are opened from another
launcher. Offline accounts can play singleplayer and join servers running in offline mode. Servers
in online mode reject them, as they do in every other launcher.
Both sit next to "Sign in to Microsoft" everywhere an account can be added: the account card, the modal you get when pressing Play with no account, and "Sign in to Minecraft" in the getting started checklist. Upstream offered Microsoft and nothing else at all three.
Microsoft sign-in
Microsoft sign-in opens your own browser rather than a webview inside the launcher, so your password manager, autofill and passkeys work, and you can see in the address bar that the page is really Microsoft's.
Microsoft cannot hand the result back: the client id the launcher uses is Minecraft's own, whose
only registered redirect is a fixed page on login.live.com, with no loopback address for the
launcher to listen on. So the browser lands on that page with the code in the address and you copy
the address into the launcher. The webview is still one click away for anyone the browser does not
work out for.
Ely.by accounts
"Add Ely.by account" sits in the same account card. It asks for an Ely.by account name or email and
a password, which go to authserver.ely.by and nowhere else. With two-factor authentication on,
append the current code to the password after a colon, which is Ely.by's own convention.
At launch the game is pointed at Ely.by with authlib-injector, downloaded once and cached, so such an account can play singleplayer and join any server that accepts Ely.by.
The account is stored in the same table as every other one, marked by the client token Ely.by issues; the token pair is checked and renewed against Ely.by a few times a day rather than on every read of the account list.
Signing in on Ely.by's own page instead of in this form would be better, and needs an OAuth application registered with Ely.by — one has not been registered for Modrinth Enhanced.
Sidebar and news
The Modrinth Servers button in the left sidebar can be switched off under Settings > Features > Sidebar.
The news section in the right sidebar folds away by clicking its heading. The right sidebar itself folds away with the arrow button in the title bar, which upstream only shows once "Hide right sidebar" is turned on in settings. Both remember what they were set to across restarts, and the title bar button briefly shows a check once its state is saved. On pages that need the sidebar, such as the mod browser, the button stays in place, greyed out.
None of the three reach Modrinth. Preference syncing maps a fixed list of named fields in both directions and these are not in it, so they are neither sent to your Modrinth account nor overwritten by another device.
Window
On Linux the window has rounded corners while it floats. Maximized, fullscreen or with native decorations turned on, it is square as before. The window is created transparent for this, which needs a compositor; without one the corners show black.
A click with the middle mouse button on anything that scrolls starts autoscroll: press and release to scroll until the next click, or hold and drag to scroll until you let go. Links and text fields keep their middle-click. Windows is left alone, since WebView2 autoscrolls by itself.
File pickers on Linux go through the XDG desktop portal, so KDE shows its own dialog and GNOME its own, instead of a GTK dialog the AppImage themes as light Adwaita. Without a portal, GTK's dialog is used as before. Windows and macOS already use their native pickers.
Skins
With an Ely.by account selected, the skin page shows the account's skins on Ely.by: apply one, add one from a file, switch its model or delete it. Ely.by has no API for changing skins, so the launcher makes the website's own calls from a hidden window and asks you to sign in there once.
On servers that send no skins, such as offline-mode servers, the game looks each player's skin up by
name: first in the player_skins folder in the launcher directory (<name>.png, <name>-slim.png,
capes/, elytras/), then Ely.by, then Mojang, with capes from OptiFine. Settings > Features > Skins
has the switch and a button that opens the folder.
The Browse tab finds skins elsewhere. Ely.by's catalogue is browsed in the app, with its sorting, filters and like, wearer and view counts. NameMC, laby.net and crafty.gg open in a window of the app instead, because their skin lists are bot-protected or not meant for other programs; the skin page you open there is previewed and can be added.
Instances and crashes
A running instance can be started again from the button next to Stop, as whichever account is selected, and the Logs tab then shows a console for each copy.
After a crash the Logs tab reads the crash report, the JVM error file and the end of the log, and says what went wrong: out of memory, the wrong Java, missing or duplicate mods and more.
Ely.by skin management, skins for every player, second copies and crash explanations are adapted from Noctrinth.
Modrinth+
Nothing in the app is gated behind Modrinth+. In upstream it decides whether the ad slot, the consent prompt and the two "Upgrade to Modrinth+" prompts are shown, and nothing else — so removing the advertising is the whole of it, and there is nothing further to unlock from here. Badges and everything else a subscription buys are decided on Modrinth's servers.
What is not removed
Download attribution still happens. It is a header on downloads you already asked for, and it is what credits project authors for them. Removing it would take money out of creators' pockets without making anyone more private.
posthog-js and @sentry/vue remain listed in package.json. Nothing imports them any more, so
neither ends up in a build; removing the entries would mean carrying a patch against the lockfile
for no practical gain.
Relationship to the official app
Modrinth Enhanced keeps the upstream bundle identifier, which means it uses the same data directory as the official Modrinth App. Instances, settings and accounts carry over in both directions, and it can be installed as a drop-in replacement.
The flip side: do not run both at once, and on Windows the two installers share an uninstall entry.
If you would rather have them fully separated, change identifier in
apps/app/tauri.conf.json — it is one line in 0001-Rename-the-app-to-Modrinth-Enhanced.patch.
Building it yourself
You need git, Node (the version in the upstream .nvmrc), pnpm via Corepack, a Rust toolchain,
JDK 17, and on Linux libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev, libayatana-appindicator3-dev and librsvg2-dev.
scripts/prepare.sh # check out the pinned upstream tag and apply every patch
scripts/check.sh # assert the patches still do what they claim
scripts/build.sh # build installers into build/artifacts
build/ is scratch space and is never committed.
Working on the patches
The patched checkout is an ordinary git repository with one commit per patch, so patches are maintained as commits rather than as diffs by hand:
scripts/prepare.sh # build/upstream, branch `enhanced`
cd build/upstream
# ...edit, then either commit a new change or amend an existing one
cd ../..
scripts/export-patches.sh # rewrite patches/ from those commits
Patches are applied to the release they were exported against (patches/base.txt), where they
always fit, and then rebased onto the release in upstream.txt when that is newer. The rebase
merges against the files the patches were written for, so upstream changes near a hunk resolve by
themselves. When one genuinely conflicts, scripts/prepare.sh stops with the rebase in progress in
build/upstream, to be resolved with git rebase --continue, after which
scripts/export-patches.sh writes the fixed series back against the new release.
To move to a newer upstream release:
scripts/latest-upstream.sh --write # update upstream.txt
scripts/prepare.sh
Automation
- Build (
.github/workflows/build.yml) runs on every push and pull request, and is also the reusable workflow the release job calls. It applies the patches, checks them, and builds on Linux, Windows and macOS. - Upstream release (
.github/workflows/upstream-release.yml) runs daily. If Modrinth has published a newer release thanupstream.txt, it rebases the patches onto it, rebuilds and — only if every platform built and every check passed — commits the bump, tags it with the upstream version and publishes a release with the installers. - Revisions come from the same run: when
patches/orscripts/changed since the last release of that upstream version, it is released again asv0.21.2-2,v0.21.2-3and so on. The app and installers still carry the upstream version: RPM and the Windows installers do not accept a suffix in it.
scripts/check.sh is what makes the automation trustworthy. A patch can apply cleanly and still
stop doing its job if upstream moves the thing it was holding down, so the checks assert the
outcome instead of the diff: the app is named correctly, offline accounts are wired up end to end,
no telemetry endpoint survives into the built frontend, and the installers are named after this
fork.
Licence
The Modrinth App is GPL-3.0, and so is everything here. Modrinth Enhanced is not affiliated with or endorsed by Rinth, Inc.