#forge modding

The first couple days were continuing with my Minecraft mod, finishing up the amethyst materials in order to make way for my next gem. That was the first hour - imaging the tools in GIMP, writing their code, generating the JSON files, and finally compiling it all together to make sure everything is running. 

And, as it has been the past week, everything went smoothly - until I really began testing the results.

[ To preface: my testing up until this point has been rather lackluster. Basically I would just make sure the items appeared in the creative tab, had the correct texture, and the proper crafting recipe. ] 

This time, I decided to do a full test in vanilla. Giving myself some basic items, I found a vein of the amethyst ore in a cave and started mining with my ruby shickaxe. Boom. Problems. 

Turns out the shickaxe tool I was so proud of a few weeks ago has a few issues with custom blocks. It will mine vanilla ones as expected, but anything beyond that leaves a little to be desired. 

Y U DO DIS!? 

So what was expected to span a day turned into a running tally. I spent two hours the next day working on it, trying everything I could think of in both the shickaxe and ore files to make it work. 

[ Side note: I find it amusing that, given how much I complained Minecraft didn’t allow me my usual preference of test-driven development, the only way I’ve been able to figure this out is make tiny changes to the code, compile and see if it works. ] 

So far nothing I’ve tried has worked. I’m considering reworking the entire code for the shickaxe to see if that fixes anything, or perhaps (if it comes to it) scrapping the idea all together and just making individual pickaxes and shovels (though I have no guarantee those will work either.) 

Ahh Minecraft. Just when I thought I had you figured out. 

But the next day, fueled by my frustration, was incredibly productive. I jumped back to AlexaWeb and started to fill in some of the missing elements. 

The first was my “About Me” section. Despite having to write (or speak) about myself at least a few times a year, I never quite know what to say. Hey, I was a journalist - I’m used to writing about other people’s accomplishments. 

But with the help of NPR’s This American Life and a nice, cold soda, I eked out a couple paragraph/sentences about myself. Again, the entire thing is still in it’s formation stage, but I’m rather pleased as it stands. 

TLDR: Look at me! I can adult! Or at least write coherrently coherently. 

To take a break from writing words and go back to writing code, I played around with the footer of my page. I’m still finding a good spot to put my email (mailto links aren’t working with my laptop, so I have no way of testing whether or not they work) but I was able to link my GitHub and LinkedIn pages nicely. 

All and all, I’m still chugging along. The next couple days will be rather interesting as I finish this project while simultaneously moving into my senior year of undergrad. My goal is to have my website completely finished, or at least to a final draft. 

While I’ve been thinking about new content to add to the game, this latest update has been mostly implementing ideas I had earlier this summer. Namely: amethysts!

Much purple. Very hard to spell correctly. Wow.

Continuing with my gems trend, I chose amethyst namely due to the colour. The process was exactly the same as creating the ruby materials, with the added pressure that I rewrote the word four or five times before finally caving and googling the proper spelling. It took a bit of effort.

amythest, amethest, amythyst, amythist, ...

The second hurdle was dealing with the custom ore generator - but once I (with help) realized I was trying to spawn an ungodly amount of ore blocks at the same time and crashing my game, that, too, passed easily.

Once these were dealt with, actually creating the components were rather easy, and I began poking at some of the methods to see what else I could change. Ah-ha! Ore drops.

Previously, the method responsible for the number of items (rubies, amethysts, etc.) was hard-coded to one. In vanilla Minecraft, diamonds (what I’ve been loosely modeling my gems after) drops between 1-4 diamonds per ore block. So I quickly set up a rng and reset the drops.

Not pictured here: the 10 minutes it took me to realize my original code allowed an ore to drop nothing, and my subsequent rush to fix it.

Next I started working on the tools made of the gems. As of now I have a ruby axe and hoe, and an amethyst sword.

Again not pictured: my joy in discovering I don’t screw up the JSONs anymore.

Even more than that, I finally got around to creating custom tool materials, rather than relying on the vanilla emerald (for some reason diamond-level materials are classified as emerald in the code.) Both ruby and amethyst lie between iron and diamond in terms of stats, with amethyst being just a twinge better.

As always there are a bunch of things I still want to add - the rest of the amethyst items, modifying the axe to mine faster onLeftClick, adding more gems such as sapphires and actual emerald tools.

After many hours of caffeinated research (and a little help from a wonderful person) the mystery of the Shickaxe has finally been solved. We ended up creating an entire new template class that extended ItemTool and customized it to break the blocks we wanted (namely those that are normally broken by pickaxes and shovels.) 

On the plus side, this gives us a lot of flexibility into extending this class to make new items in the future - such as including the properties of an axe.

But, as with much of Minecraft’s code, figuring out how to do this was a pain, which does not bode well for the other things I want to begin including in this mod.

What you don’t see is that these lines go on horizontally for awhile...

The second part of this was creating the ruby shickaxe. Extending the template class and putting it through the game registry is second nature at this point, but I once again ran into issues with the JSON generator. You’d think after two months I’d know how to get it right the first time, but eh, details. 

This was the final design - 

Plus a custom crafting recipe - I’m on fire!

I’m still finishing up the ruby items, but with this success, I’m considering branching out into other joint tools - a shovel/hoe combination perhaps? 

My next mod project will also take a bit of research to make possible - a toaster. It’s simple, but I like toasted things in real life, and I like the idea of a mini-oven that would take fewer resources than an oven, but would still provide more hunger bars than raw. 

Rubies!

I know this seems rather basic, particularly since there are mods that add dozens of new ores to the game, but from this one cool-looking block (originally called something else,) I came up with the idea to challenge myself to actually make an ore. So from here I created the ore block:

Then it was a matter of what happens with ores in-game. After looking up some example code, I figured out how to make the ore block drop a little ruby (it may be just one at the moment, but I’m considering adding a random number generator to drop more.) 

Then came the most difficult part - learning how to make the ore spawn naturally. Through a bit of trial and error (see the picture below,) I found a good balance of rare but not too rare and had it successfully generate in my test world. 

This was perhaps a little too common. 

I was working on the next obvious step, having the rubies dropped from the ore blocks be able to craft into the ruby block, but there’s still an error in the code I’m trying to figure out. I did have a fun error come out of it though. In trying out different ideas, I accidentally set it so an empty crafting table was the recipe for 9 rubies - oops. 

Yes, give me all the free gems!

From here I have four goals for the mod: 

1. Fix the recipe for rubies becoming ruby blocks

2. Create ruby tools (sword, pickaxe, shovel, hoe, axe)

3. Create ruby armour 

4. Repeat for other interesting ores. Amethyst? Onyx? Sapphire?

It feels good to get back into this, and I’m really looking forward to see what comes of the next three weeks. (Though at some point, I should work on something besides Minecraft.) 

TacoPick: 

I’ve been thinking more of what to include in my mod and have come to the brilliant idea of creating tools out of food. I haven’t quite decided what the drawback will be (in terms of durability, blocks that can be broken, etc.) but it has been amusing explaining why I’m making a pickaxe look like a taco. 

On the positives, the item does work in-game and has a shaped crafting recipe (my first one!) Like any in-game pickaxe, it takes two sticks topped with three items, in this case tacos. Figuring out the shaped recipe took a bit of time, but it was rather cool to finally see it working. (Code below)

But that is where the good news comes to an end. In order to add the custom texture to the game, you need to generate a JSON file. Luckily there is a generator that will create one for you, but it is notoriously finicky and often does not like to work if everything isn’t exactly right in the code. When that happens, there’s basically a checklist of things to look at to try and find the error. And to put it lightly, I really do not have the patience for that right now. 

while tiny, the pick is rather pretty

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On a tangential note, I did find an interesting article called 10 Books Every Programmer Should Read. I had heard of a couple of the books before, but I spent a bit of time finding copies of some of the more interesting ones - notably Coders at Work, Clean Code, and The Mythical Man Month. I’ve found that while I don’t often have a lot of time to break out the laptop and get to work, I do have chances to grab my tablet and read a bit. So why not make that time productive too? 

To be fair, I was super busy today and didn’t really have a chance to sit down and look at anything. But I did get distracted by video games after work, so I’m not entirely blameless for the lack of progress. Oops. That said, I did complete a full hour tonight all spent working on my “fluff” project - yup, Minecraft. 

In actuality, modding with Forge has been quite interesting. The source code can be confusing as hell, but the challenge it presents has been helping me get used to larger products that aren’t obvious at a quick glance. And while I did use a tutorial of sorts for my first custom food (a taco), the rest was done myself with a pinch of help at the end to make my custom sword even more entertaining. All and all, here’s what was accomplished: 

Custom Food + Custom Recipe (that contains another custom food!)

To give some context, there is an inside joke among my friends and I about tacos in general, so I figured they’d be the perfect first item to put in my mod. Plus tacos are delicious - who wouldn’t want them in Minecraft? 

In this case, I created a custom recipe so one wheat would produce two of my custom flour item, which in turn (when combined with a raw chicken) would make three tacos. They fill just shy of 8 “hearts” of hunger and can stack up to 64. 

Custom Sword

So with my new foodstuffs, I took the next logical step - make a weapon out of them! Introducing the Taco Sword which, thanks to my amazing image editing skills, looks absolutely nothing like a taco. Presently it has the same stats as a standard diamond sword, but that may change in the near future. But the coolest part is what happens when you attack a mob with them - with each hit, the mob drops tacos! It’s silly and ridiculous and absolutely the perfect addition to this mod. 

(Just for fun, here’s a quick shot of some of the code. I kept forgetting to render my items with the game registry which leads to very frustrating errors.)