ModForge

Deutsch

A visual editor that turns clicked-together items, blocks, tools, armour and recipes into a complete NeoForge mod project for Minecraft 1.21.1 — and compiles it to a finished .jar in one click.

No Java required. You still get a clean Gradle project if you want to keep working by hand.

Note on language: the editor's interface is currently German only. Everything it generates — Java code, JSON, en_us language files — is English. Translating the UI is a good first contribution.

What comes out

A single description produces, among other things:

• build.gradle, settings.gradle, gradle.properties and the Gradle wrapper
• Java source: main class, ModItems, ModBlocks, ModCreativeTabs, ModToolTiers, ModArmorMaterials, fuel handler
• Blockstates, item and block models
• Textures as PNG — hand-drawn or generated
• Loot tables including Fortune and Silk Touch variants, the way diamond ore does it
• Recipes (crafting table, shapeless, furnace and blast furnace); tool and armour recipes automatically
• Ore worldgen: configured_feature, placed_feature and the matching NeoForge biome_modifier
• Block tags (mineable/*, needs_*_tool)
• Language files en_us and de_de

Ore that actually spawns

An ore block in the creative menu is easy. One that shows up while you're mining is not. It takes three JSON files pointing at each other, and any typo among them produces the exact same result: the world looks like it always did, and nothing tells you why.

ModForge writes that chain for you and offers the vanilla numbers as starting points — like iron, like diamond, like emerald. Next to them sits an estimate of how many blocks per chunk you'll actually get, compared against real ores.

The check before the build

Minecraft loads broken mods without complaining and quietly drops whatever it didn't understand. So ModForge checks first, and explains every finding instead of printing a line number:

• ore heights outside the dimension — above Y 127 the Nether has its bedrock ceiling
• minimum and maximum height swapped
• ore that drops nothing; blocks that need a tool but permit none
• duplicate ids, unknown ingredients, empty recipes, invalid mod ids

Errors block the build. Warnings don't.

Getting started

npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173. The Beispiel laden button fills everything with a working demo mod.

Compiling needs a JDK 21. ModForge looks in the usual places on its own; otherwise:

export MODFORGE_JAVA_HOME=/path/to/jdk21

Without a JDK the ZIP export still works.

The editor

Section	Contents
Mod	name, id, version, author, creative tab
Items	stack size, rarity, tooltips, food, fuel, enchantment glint
Blocks	hardness, tool tier, light, sound, drops, XP, worldgen
Tools	one set yields pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe and sword
Armour	helmet through boots including both worn layers
Recipes	crafting table (3×3), shapeless and furnace
Build	validation, ZIP export and .jar build with a live log

Textures are drawn in the built-in pixel editor (16×16, armour layers 64×32). Without your own drawing, ModForge derives a deterministic placeholder from the id so a model is never missing.

Your work is autosaved in the browser. Speichern writes the description to a .modforge.json file, Öffnen reads it back. The open section lives in the address bar, so a reload returns you to the same place.

Installing the mod

Drop the built .jar into the mods folder of a Minecraft installation running NeoForge for 1.21.1.

Layout

src/core/      Generator — runs identically in Node and in the browser
  spec.ts        Zod schema, the single source of truth about a mod
  generator/     gradle.ts, java.ts, resources.ts
  png.ts         dependency-free PNG encoder
  textures.ts    placeholder graphics
src/server/    Fastify: validation, ZIP export, Gradle build with a log stream
src/ui/        React interface
mdk/1.21.1/    Gradle wrapper from the official MDK
test/          Vitest

The generator touches no browser or Node API, which is why the interface can compute the very same preview the server later writes to disk.

Commands

npm run dev        # server and interface together
npm test           # Vitest
npm run typecheck  # tsc --noEmit
npm run build      # build the interface for production
npm start          # server alone (also serves dist/ if present)

npx tsx scripts/build-demo.ts [dir] generates the demo mod and builds it end to end — handy for exercising the generator without the interface. npx tsx scripts/screenshots.ts refreshes the images in docs/ (needs npm run dev running).

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome. Translating the interface to English is the most useful thing anyone could pick up right now. Two house rules:

1. Never write Minecraft APIs or JSON formats from memory. They change quietly between versions, and wrong fields are discarded without a word at load time. Check against the real client jar and the extracted NeoForge sources.
2. Every generator change needs a test and a real run of npx tsx scripts/build-demo.ts. That TypeScript compiles says nothing about whether Minecraft likes the files.

Licence

ModForge is MIT licensed.

What you build with it is yours. This project claims nothing over generated mods — no attribution requirement, no conditions on releasing or selling them, whether on CurseForge, Modrinth or privately. The generated Java code and resources are yours to use without strings attached.

Versions

Minecraft 1.21.1 · NeoForge 21.1.250 · ModDevGradle 2.0.147 · Java 21