What is Forge?

This tutorial is a mod development tutorial based on Forge, so it's natural to answer the question, "What is Forge?

At first glance, this doesn't seem like a question at all, “Forge? Isn't Forge just Forge?” This is probably the first thought that comes to your mind when you see this question.

But it's necessary to answer this question, and I'm going to talk a little bit about what Forge is and it's history. This may seem unrelated to our tutorial, but it is actually the "Lore" of mod development and learning it will help you communicate with others better.

We have to start with Minecraft itself, but first we have to make it clear that Minecraft is a commercial software written in Java. This means two things: first, Minecraft is relatively easy to modify, and second, code itself is not open source and is obfuscated. Early on in Minecraft's history, because Mojang never provided an official API¹ for Minecraft, the "Mod Coder Pack" project was born (hereinafter referred to as MCP).

Remember what I said earlier about two features of Minecraft that MCP uses to implement a set of tools that allow developers to modify content of Minecraft jar packs directly?

So srg name, notch name and mcp name were born.

So what are these three?

The first is the notch name, which is a name that Minecraft has directly decompiled and obfuscated, and is usually a meaningless alphanumeric combination. You can tell from the name Notch that it comes directly from Minecraft (and the grudge against Notch), for example u is a typical notch name.

Here is an example for notch name

public class cbw extends cbq {
   public int u() {
      return 0;
   }

   public int t() {
      return 127;
   }
}

Next is the srg name, which is a one-to-one correspondence with the notch name, and srg name will not change from one version to the next. The reason it is called srg name(srg meaning Searge) is to commemorate the leader of the MCP project, Searge. There are corresponding prefixes and suffixes to distinguish Searge and Notch names. Take the above u as an example, its srg name is func_214968_u.

public class NetherGenSettings extends GenerationSettings {
   public int func_214968_u() {
      return 0;
   }

   public int func_214967_t() {
      return 127;
   }
}

Finally there's the mcp name, the name we come across most in mod development. In mcp name, the code is already readable. It's the same as the names we use in our normal java programs. But the mcp name is subject to change. For example, the func_214968_u above has an mcp name of getBedrockFloorHeight. The class name in mcp name is the same as the class name in srg name.

public class NetherGenSettings extends GenerationSettings {
   public int getBedrockFloorHeight() {
      return 0;
   }

   public int getBedrockRoofHeight() {
      return 127;
   }
}

As time went on, mod developers realized that modding Jar files directly to write mods was too crude, and that mod-to-mod compatibility was virtually non-existent. So Forge was born.

Forge was actually a set of third-party APIs implemented by modifying the Minecraft way, and as time went on, MCP is now dead (some of MCP's tools are still alive). In addition to the Forge set of API's there's also a lightweight Fabric API. Forge itself underwent a rewrite after Minecraft 1.13 arrived, introducing a number of API's for functional programming.

So how did Forge use the three names we mentioned earlier?

After you install Forge, everything in the game will be decompiled into srg names to run, and your compiled mods will also be obfuscated into srg names to make sure it runs properly.