Dead Comedians Resource Expansion

a curated list of free resources for minecraft modding

Project maintained by epxzzy Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

INTRODUCTION

Hello there! If you’re here it means you wanna learn modding, and presumably don’t know where to start. We probably should start by talking about modding itself, so let’s see a definition of it:

Modding- (verb) activity involving developing several mental illnesses while dealing with Mojang’s s̶h̶i̶t̶a̶s̶s̶ lovely codebase

On a more serious note it basicly means

Writing code that upon compilation adds or modifies some sort of content ingame

So what do you need to start modding? Simple : a computer and java knowledge. Since you’re here I consider you have a decent computer or a laptop. But What about Java?

IMPORTANT NOTE

 From here on out I will be mentioning various links and what they are for. If however you have read this already and just 
 	want the links you can find a condensed list of them right below  <a href="https://epxzzy.github.io/Dead-Comedians-Resource-Expansion/Learning_java">Compiled Resource list</a>

Learning Java

Java is a coding language. It is what is used for coding Minecraft Java edition and modding it. In order to start modding you will need an understanding of Object Oriented Programing (OOP) and the Java language itself. While this list is not dedicated to learning java I have made a list of SOME Java learning resources. However any way of learning the Java concepts mentioned above will do.

IMPORTANT NOTE

 While it is easy to think that you can just skip learning Java, as many have did. 
 More often than not you will find yourself in a lot of trouble, not knowing what is going on in front of you especially if you have
  	no prior coding experience. 
 A solid understanding of the language also allows for you to create more optimised code and be able to both evolve faster on 
 	your journey and get into more difficult topics with a lot more ease. 
 So do yourself a favour and don't cut corners, especially now, at the start!

MODDING

Choosing a modloader

Modloaders are tools that help players install and manage mods. But for developers modloaders are an API or a framework which allow us to add content into the game. Choosing the appropriate modloader affects your modding experience, your target audience and of course the amount of downloads you will have if you publish your mod. So what are our contestants? Fabric and Forge . Pretty much, there are other ones, but nobody uses them anymore, and Forge also has the Neoforge Flavour but I’ll explain that in a bit. For now the jist of it is this:

Fabric is very light weight, which you think would make it better than Forge, but the reason Forge is not as light weight is because it is more powerfull, meaning it makes it more accessible for the developer to do more complex things, as opposed to Fabric where you can do those same things but it will be a lot more difficult.

There’s also the afore mentioned target audience, Fabric usually has more vanilla+/ vanilla friendly mods, mainly consisting of tweaks, QoL mods or optimization mods. Forge on the other side , due to its more powerful nature usually hosts more content focused mods.

Now there’s also that third option I mentioned: Neforge. Neoforge is a fork of the Forge mod loader maintained by a separate group, created after some controversies relating to the Forge team, I will not get into detail as it is beyond the scope of this website. Where Neoforge strives is performance, while being as powerful as Forge, it is more optimised and runs better. There is one downside to it. Almost nobody uses Neoforge in versions prior to Minecraft 1.21. It is usually replaced by Forge, this also applies the other way around where Forge gets replaced by Neo(short for Neoforge ofc) after 1.21.

This swiftly brings us to the problem of choosing a Minecraft version to mod. While technically you can mod any version you want , there’s more optimal versions. These are often refered to as modding versions. And usually encompass: 1.16, 1.18.2, 1.20.1 and 1.21.1, with most people resorting to either of the last 2. Now you may ask “Why not always update with the newest version?”. The answer is, it’s more trouble than it’s worth, unless ALL developers update to newer versions, most people don’t have a reason to move to newer versions. Every update the codebase changes, no matter the modloader, making especially big mods hard to bring up to date, especially with Minecraft’s new drop-based update system which makes updates come at a much higher rate. So most people just choose one of these versions, and only update when a new “modding version appears”, while players rely on mods that backport features from newer versions to the current modding versions.

TL;DR:

Modloaders:

Versions:

IMPORTANT NOTE

 These are not hard rules, there's other modloader's like Quilt, but they are not used as much. Same applies for versions,
 	you can mod whatever version you wish, I just present you the ones that are used more often, aka that YOU and OTHERS will download 
more often, and usually have more documentation as a result of that!

IMPORTANT NOTE

No matter the modloader you are using make sure you look at vanilla code, most of the time you can find something similar to what you need in game. You can also look at other people’s code, while obviously A. understanding what the code does and how it works, not just copy pasting, 
 and 
  		B. respecting the license of the repository

Neoforge

Great so you chose Neoforge as your modloader of choice. Your main friend’s will be:

Forge

Since the Forge modloader has existed for longer, there’s more resources you can go for:

Fabric

If you choose Fabric then you should look at:

General

After all of that here’s some links that all of you could use (probably) no matter the version and modloader:

Mixins are a complex topic that may require a lot of explanation. They’re purpose, in a surface level explanation is to overwrite vanilla code. However in most cases events are more desirable since having multiple mixins in the same place may break while having multiple events in the same place from different mods should not cause problems.

  • Mixins
    • Official mixins
      • Official mixin wiki, explains mixins from the ground up
    • NoNumberMan's mixin tutorial
      • While a bit outdated should still be helpfull, make sure to read the video's descriptions! Also Despite the title saying Fabric/Forge, mixins are universal for all modloaders so NeoForge is fine as well
    • Mixin Cheatsheet
      • More concise information, if you're learning on the go or just trying to refresh your memory
    • Kaupenjoe's Mixin Tutorial
      • Kaupenjoe's tutorial on mixins, while on an older version it does help with understanding basics

    • Discord Server

    *Credit to doctor4t’s server

    Credit to epxzzy for help with repo, Diemant for 2/4 mixin tutorials and providing the doctor4t recomandations