Porting - Luke100000/minecraft-comes-alive GitHub Wiki
Porting requires a lot of work for very little gain. For example, here is the difference between 1.20.1 and 1.21.1 for a single mod. There are hundreds of changed files and thousands of lines of code—just the port, with no new features, and it is probably even more buggy than before.
Porting takes time, and fixing all the bugs caused by the changes takes even more time. This effort increases with the number of versions that must be maintained simultaneously. Wouldn't it make more sense to focus on creating more or better content instead? Therefore, it is reasonable to collectively agree on "modding versions" such as 1.18.2, 1.19.2, and 1.20.1.
To understand the scale: if every mod had to update to every patch, and a single version port takes around 1 hour (which is a gross underestimation), and considering there are currently over 100,000 Minecraft mods, every patch would waste over 100,000 working hours! That is equivalent to 50 people working full time for an entire year. That is enough workforce to create Minecraft 2—every single patch! And for what? A funny retexture of spawn eggs? (I'm looking at you, 1.20.5!)
For everyone's sanity and to ensure that as many mods as possible run on the same version, the following versions are currently supported by me and most other modders:
| Version | 1.16.5 | 1.18.2 | 1.19.2 | 1.20.1 | 1.21.1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Status | LTS | LTS | LTS | Active | Dev |
- LTS means it will only receive very crucial bug fixes.
- Active means this is the recommended version and will receive new features.
- Dev means it is a version currently being ported, and it may be replaced by another version at any time. For example, 1.21.1 may be replaced by 1.21.4 at any moment. Therefore, I do not recommend using the newest major version for modding.