How to choose?
TL;DR: Depends on what framework you use.
| User Dev. Tool | "MCP"? | Yarn? | Official Mapping? | Official+Parchment/Crane? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ForgeGradle | Yes [1] | w/ plugin (no known plugin yet) | Yes | w/ plugin |
| Fabric Loom | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
With the decommission of MCPBot, the only two feasible choices left are Yarn and official mappings (w/ additional mappings for parameters and javadocs).
It is recommended to use Official mappings for the following reasons:
- No need to wait for update: they are shipped alongside with every new release.
- Representative: they faithfully reflect how Mojangstas believe Minecraft is structured
- Unification: different modding ecosystem can now possibly share a single, consistent mapping system, reducing communication obstacle.
It is also recommeded to use Yarn for the following reasons:
- No legal burden: Official mapping is released under a ambiginous license in which the "red tape" is blurred.
- Out-of-box parameters and javadocs: official mapping does not contain information about parameters, nor javadocs. There are other crowdsource projects to provide them as a complement, but relying on other projects means further delay. Yarn is well-known for fast update on snapshots, meaning the trade-off between few hours and detailed documentation out-of-box is worthwhile.
For projects like Plasma, use them when you are dealing with legacy versions of Minecraft like beta-1.7.3.
QuiltMC is still in development; its website has not provided information on how to use QSL (Quilt Standard Libaray) to develop a mod. Therefore we won't recommend their mapping for the use with Quilt Loader+QSL for now.
Special remark:
Until Minecraft 1.15.1 (inclusive). For anything between 1.16 (inclusive) and 1.17 (exclusive), a set of manually curated mappings is provided by Forge team under unknown terms. They are also highly incomplete, especially when it comes to world generation and rendering. ↩︎