When you play the game normally a curseforge account is not required to access free mods. But as a mod author you will often need to test your build before they are published.

This is where My Mods comes in. After linking a connected account for a given platform, when you visit the mod browser in game you should see a new tab for "My Mods".

This is where you will find all the mods your account owns or has access to for testing.

From the My Mods menu you can install mods. The versions of a mod listed here may be different than what is listed in the public Mod Browser.

In these cases installing here will install the unpublished version of thhe mod so that you can test it.

Simply start singleplayer with the mod after installing the unpublished version.

Servers can install the unpublished version of a mod by adding -dev to the end of the mod id in the launch arguments (e.g. -mods=926919-dev,900062-dev ).

Any account attempting to join the server will need to have access to the unpublished version of the mod as well, or else joining will fail. Don't use unpublished versions on player servers.

In the project page, under "Manage Project" and "Members". Mod authors can add up to 5 other CurseForge accounts for testing and/or development. In particular the "Cross-Platform Testing" permission will be important for anyone that needs to access unpublished versions of the mod on console platforms.