Shadowfacts

The outer part of a shadow is called the penumbra

Setting up the Development Environment

Making a Forge Mod for 1.10.2

Java

This series does not cover learning Java or installing the JDK. You should have the Java 8 JDK installed already.

IntelliJ IDEA

I will be using IntelliJ IDEA throughout this series as it is my IDE of choice. You can download the free community version of IDEA here. It is possible to use Eclipse if you prefer.

Forge MDK

From the Forge files site, download the latest MDK for 1.10.2. (Click the button with the floppy disk icon labeled MDK on the left.) After download, unzip the MDK to a new folder wherever you like. After unzipping the MDK, we can delete a number of extraneous files that are part of the MDK. You can delete every file in the folder that’s not one of these:

  • src/
  • build.gradle
  • gradle/
  • gradlew
  • gradlew.bat

Gradle

Before we setup Forge and IDEA, we need to configure Gradle (the build system Forge mods use) to have more RAM available, otherwise we will not be able to decompile and deobfuscate Minecraft. Open the file at ~/.gradle/gradle.properties (where ~ is your user directory) and create it if it does not exist. Add this to the file to instruct Gradle to use at most 3 gigabytes of memory:

org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx3G

We’ll need to make a couple of additions to the build.gradle file that is part of the Forge MDK. This will configure IDEA and Gradle to use Java 8 to compile our project, allowing us to use the shiny new Java 8 features.

sourceCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
targetCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8

Forge

Now, to setup Forge and create the IDEA configurations we will need, run this command. (Replace idea with eclipse if you are using Eclipse and remove the leading ./ if you are using Windows)

./gradlew setupDecompWorkspace idea

Note: This may take a while to run, depending on the speed of your computer.

Now, if everything ran successfully, you should have a file that has the .ipr extension in your mod folder. Launch IDEA and after doing so, click the Import Project button and open the .ipr file in your mod folder and wait a moment for IDEA to reconfigure itself for the project.

Note: If you have not launched IDEA before, you may need to go through some first time setup options beforehand.

Now that you’ve got IDEA setup, check out how to setup the main mod class.