Choosing the Minecraft Forge Version - Jacob1225/pufferfish-minecraft-mod GitHub Wiki

Tl;dr: Our group chose to work on Forge 1.16.5 for the mod.

The newest version of Forge at this time is 1.18.2, however, from the very beginning we decided this would not be a major consideration since documentation, guides, and forum help are limited for this version.

We considered two main versions of Forge for this mod, 1.12.2 and 1.16.5.

Reasons for 1.12.2:

• Classes and method names were easier to understand and made the learning curve lower
• Modding tutorials using 1.16 seemed to give mixed results. Method names seemed to be hard to trace with the scarce documentation and would change within different versions of 1.16.
• We had a good reference material, where another modder implemented an arcade machine that could play Snake and Tetris. https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/arcade-mod

Reasons for 1.16.5:

• mcjunitlib testing library is only compatible with 1.16.5 and 1.15.2. Testing support for the Minecraft environment in 1.12.2 is nonexistent.
• Many modding tutorials available online and although the mappings were changing throughout 1.16, we later found that using the bot in the Forge Discord server could trace these changes. https://discord.gg/forge
• We found other reference material of an arcade mod done in 1.16.x. https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/casinocraft

Final Decision:

Originally based on the above reasons, we chose to start with 1.12. However, we encountered several issues that lead to switching to 1.16

• Could not find alternatives for Minecraft testing
• Custom blocks and items would not load properly
• Textures could not be drawn onto the Space Invaders GUI in different layers
• Poor documentation of commonly occurring issues and minimal forum help since questions about 1.12 are no longer supported