---
title: "Your modpack no longer changes version while you sleep"
description: "A customer’s server jumped from All the Mods 8.0 to 8.1 on its own, overnight. Their friends could no longer join. Here is why, and what we changed."
url: https://tickserv.com/news/modpack-version-pinning
site: "TickServ (https://tickserv.com)"
lang: en
published: 2026-09-01
games: [minecraft]
---
On the morning of 30 August, a paying customer's server could no longer be joined by their group.
Nothing had crashed: overnight, the server had changed modpack version. All the Mods 10 had gone from
8.0 to 8.1, published the evening before at 22:15. The server followed on its next start. The
launchers in the group were still on 8.0.

## It was not an outage, it was our design flaw

A modded server reinstalls its pack on every start. With no version set, it takes the latest one
published by the pack author — that is the documented behaviour of the image we use, and nothing on
our side contradicted it.

Worse: we had made it more likely ourselves. A fix shipped three days earlier excludes the mods folder
from backups, for good reasons — it was heavy, and it gets rebuilt at boot. The consequence we had not
seen: **every start becomes a fresh install**, and therefore one more chance to change version.

## What changed

**Your server freezes on the version it installed**, by itself, from its first successful start.
Nothing moves without you.

**A "Modpack version" panel** in the console: what is installed, what will be installed on the next
start, and a way to pick another version — or to go back to automatic updates if you prefer them. Your
world is kept either way.

**And it warns you.** When a newer version is out, the panel says so, and says it will only be
installed if you pick it. Freezing without ever warning would be trading one flaw for another.

## What we got wrong on the first try

Re-reading the feature the same evening, we found it only protected **four of our ten modpacks**. The
other six — Cobblemon, COBBLEVERSE, Prominence II, Better MC, Create: Live 5 and Adrenaline — come
from Modrinth, and we were not reading the file where their version is written. The freeze silently
gave up on them: they kept updating on their own, which is exactly the flaw we claimed to have
removed. Fixed the same day.

## What this does not solve

Freezing the version does not undo an upgrade that already happened: if your world has been opened by
a newer version, we do not roll it back on our own. And the pin covers the whole pack, not one
individual mod.