Hello! I'm re-vamping this thread to be about general knowledge and such that is useful in the mapping and modding forum.
This page will contain various guides to help you users, old and new alike. If you have written a guide, please send it to me in a PM, with the PM title being (Guide) [insert guide name here]. If it is useful and informative, I will post it here! Also, if you find something wrong or that could be improved in a guide, just post here.

Guide 1: How to submit a helpful, detailed crash report!

There are several things that you should do when submitting a mod crash report to a modder.

1. Include the crash report! If you don't give the modder the crash report and just say "It crashed!" They cannot help you! Copy and paste the crash report on the purple screen.

2. use code tags. This will shorten your post making it easier to read, and thus less of an inconvenience to others.
Here is how to use the code tags.

[/code]

3. Explain when the crash happened and what you were doing at the time! A post containing only a crash report is not helpful, and will likely not get your problem fixed.

4. Be polite! If you go onto a mod thread and say "Omg this mod doesn't work it's shit, plz help me fix the crash!" Nobody is going to want to help you. Remember, the modders are doing this for free, because they want to!

If you get crashes but have no error to copy then follow this guide to get an error report guaranteed.

To run minecraft from the command line on Windows: Start->Run, enter "cmd". In the command line, enter:


Then once the error occurs READ it, see if you can fix it yourself (maybe you forgot a dependency) you can right click > mark > select the error > right click > copy THEN paste it to the thread.

For linux users it's pretty much the same:


How to set your Java environment variable in Windows:

1) Right-click on My Computer (XP) or Computer (Vista/7) in your start menu, and open the Properties window.

2) Click "Advanced System Settings" (in Vista, this is in the Tasks list on the left side of the window).

3) In the System Properties window, click the "Environment variables.." button to open the Environment Variables window.

4) Find the entry for "Path" under your System Variables. If it does not exist, double check- if it still doesn't exist, create a new variable, name it Path, and move to step 5.

5) Edit path's variable value field by adding a semicolon (';') after any text that might be there- if the field is empty, just move on to step 6.

6) Find where you've installed Java. For me, the path is C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_23\bin, but yours may vary. Find out where you've installed Java and add that path to the variable value field.

7) Hit OK on all of the windows you've opened, and your path variable should be saved. If you had any command prompts open before you set the path variable, you will have to close them and open a new command prompt for it to recognize the new path.

You should be able to use java, javac, and other java commands now.

If that's too much for you or it doesn't work for some reason, then you can run Java commands from the directory Java is installed in. So, find where you've installed Java (usually in your Program Files folder) and open the bin folder. Shift+Right-click on any empty space in the folder, and you should have an option to "Open command window here.." Do that and run the commands in the OP as indicated. Note: You'll have to do this every time you want to run java or javac- add it to your path variable so you can run java commands without being in the Java/bin folder.