Hello everyone. As you might have heard, the Forge team released Minecraft Forge for 1.13.2 on their public files page last night. This means that our community has entered another major transition period. In this post I will be discussing how I will be handling this update, as well as sharing some of my thoughts on the update in general.
For those who are newer to the Minecraft modding scene and have never dealt with an update, these are major transition periods. Many members of the community will start shifting their focus to the new 1.13.2 version. Some of the mods you are familiar with may change their mechanics, or redesign themselves in drastic ways. This change also means that mods will need to be updated to support 1.13.2, so some of your favorite mods may not be available for a while. Unfortunately, this also means that some mods may never receive the update and will be stuck on 1.12.2 indefinitely. It’s not all bad news though, the update brings many new features and improvements which will help improve the quality of the game and mods in general.
My plan for dealing with this is fairly simple. I will be spending the next few weeks finishing up my projects for 1.12.2. This means clearing out my issue tracker, pushing any last minute feature changes, and releasing any unreleased projects that are close a release. Once this process is done, I will start working on updates for my mods and releasing them as they are ready. I will be starting with library/API mods like Bookshelf, GameStages, and Tesla, and then move on to the content mods like Dark Utilities, Wawla, Hunting Dimension, and so on.
This update plan is pretty straight forward and something I have done before, however I am planning to change things up slightly. Historically I have not allowed updates to older versions once they have received an update to a new game version, barring major issues or security concerns. Moving forward I am going to be changing this policy and my build system to make it easier for updates to these older versions to be released publicly. While I don’t intend to continue maintaining the older versions, I have received a lot of contributions from the community in the past which do minor bug fixes, translation, and mod support for these older versions. Previously I have had to deny these contributions, however if the community wants to keep the older versions alive I feel they should be able to do this.
As for Minecraft and Forge itself, there has definitely been a lot of work. Forge has overhauled most of their infrastructure with newer technology and ideas. A lot of the weird hacks that they were doing has been replaced with cleaner solutions which are going to be easier to understand, and will potentially be much more efficient. The long load times have been a very hot issue with 1.12.2, and it is very clear that the Forge team has had these issues in mind when designing the system for 1.13. I am really looking forward to benchmarking and comparing the two versions in a follow up post once the 1.13.2 ecosystem has matured a bit more.
To end this post off, I want to give everyone some relevant metrics and resources. I am currently maintaining 62 published Minecraft mods. Of those 62 mods, 49 are available for 1.12.2 and 28 of them were first released on 1.12.2. I have a lot of work ahead of me, and if you’re interested in tracking my process I have a Google Sheet which will automatically update once new versions of my mod are released to CurseForge. You can also keep up with the update process on my Discord, and even get involved in some of the decisions I will be making.