Adding Mods to the Mods Folder

Where the folder is

Once Forge has run at least once it creates a mods folder inside your Minecraft game directory. That is where every mod jar goes.

• Windows — %APPDATA%\.minecraft\mods. Paste that into the address bar of File Explorer and it will take you there.
• macOS — ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/mods.
• Linux — ~/.minecraft/mods.

If the folder is not there, start the game once on the Forge profile and quit; it will exist afterwards. You can also create it by hand with exactly that name.

Putting mods in

Drop the mod's .jar straight into mods. Do not unzip it, do not rename it, and do not make subfolders — Forge reads the jar as it is, and an extracted mod will simply be ignored.

If a mod arrives as a .zip, check what is inside before assuming. Some downloads bundle the jar together with a readme or a resource pack; in that case the jar is the part that belongs in mods and the rest goes elsewhere.

Keeping separate setups apart

Mods are loaded from the game directory of the profile you launch. If you keep more than one modded setup, give each one its own game directory in the launcher's profile settings rather than swapping jars in and out of a single folder. It takes a minute to set up and saves you from a mod from last week's pack crashing this week's.

Checking it worked

Start the game on the Forge profile and open the Mods button on the main menu. Everything that loaded is listed there with its name and version. A mod that is missing from that list did not load — and the game log will say why.

Removing a mod

Take the jar out of mods. That is the whole process. Be aware that a world which used a content mod will complain about missing blocks and entities afterwards, so back the world up before removing a mod you have already built with.