Notice of end of support for Hotbars+

[VideoGameSmash12]

Hotbars+ had one hell of a life. What was initially a privately distributed mod for a few friends of mine (mainly to collect more items during the massive HD head craze on TotalFreedom 5 years ago) ended up earning a reputation for many in various item-related communities including the Shulker Archives, NBT Archives, Minecraft Item Cult, and more as the mod to have if you wanted more hotbars space.

It's been many years since then, and quite frankly Hotbars+'s codebase has started to show its age. While I initially built it to support multiple versions of the game, the foundation I built it on wasn't as solid as I thought it was, and now I am literally incapable of supporting more modern versions of the game without breaking support for the older versions. I was stuck in this predicament for months while I pondered what I should do.

In January 2025, I ultimately decided to rewrite the entire foundation from scratch with its core not relying on any Minecraft code whatsoever and use interfaces to wrap code where necessary without touching the actual code. This new mod is called Librarian, and it was officially released in June 2025. It's very similar to Hotbars+, however it's pretty much better in every way. We'll discuss that in just a bit.

I'm writing this to announce that with the introduction of Librarian, Hotbars+ is now essentially obsolete, so I'm discontinuing support for it. Librarian can be installed as a drop-in replacement for Hotbars+ and it will load up your hotbars perfectly fine.

Hotbars+ is dead, long live Librarian.

What is Librarian and why is it better than Hotbars+?

Librarian is effectively the mod I envisioned Hotbars+ to be so many years ago. Like Hotbars+, it is a Fabric mod, however it offers more to the table.

• It supports 1.12.2 all the way up to 26.1. The codebase is futureproofed so an update won't irreparably break the entire mod.
• It allows you to customize your hotbar pages. While it's only possible to edit and view the display name of the page right now, the foundation has been laid to also have descriptions and authors.
• It has proper accidental item loss protection. It currently accounts for accidental overwrites (a common issue), but in the future there will be more safety nets to prevent other problematic scenarios like accidentally downgrading your hotbar pages.

Thank you

I just want to thank everyone who supported me or Hotbars+ over the past 5 years. Even just using it counts as supporting it to me. I never expected it to gain such a following, and the fact it did blows me away. I hope you'll choose to use Librarian to keep going for another 5 years. I plan to support for as long as I can.