#also it'd be nice if electroblob's wizardry and ars nouveau could get official fabric ports but i doubt we'll be seeing that anytime soon

[dirtcube]

The great fabric vs forge ramble

two people want to hear my ramblings im going to ramble now.

Essentially, my main thoughts about forge and fabric is that they’re two modloaders for entirely different audiences of minecraft playstyle. I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who’s been playing minecraft since the indev versions, and thus a lot... a lot of hours playing modded minecraft.

Putting this under a readmore because it became really long lmao

From my experience with making modpacks for my friends and digging through pages upon pages of fabric mods, Fabric is GREAT for general-audiences type packs. There is rarely anything very complex in there. Almost every fabric mod is easy to understand and get into. There’s very little truly gameplay changing mods, save for some outliers that have recently sprung up/been ported from forge. If I have to mention the biggest gameplay changing mods for fabric, that was native to fabric, i’d have to say tech reborn, bewitchment, and origins are the ones that immediately come to mind. 

This makes fabric, as I mentioned, great for general audiences type gameplay. Vanilla+. Friendly for your-average-streamer server and for anyone that wants to play modded with their friends that aren’t as familiar with the game. It’s the people pleaser modloader, because nearly all mods will have people generally go “yeah I like that.” You won’t have people fighting over a selection in your modpack you made for your little server. And that isn’t bad! It’s very good that we have a much more accessible modloader and library of mods.

But by god is it boring and disappointing sometimes to go through curseforge’s fabric category and see vanilla+ upon vanilla+ mod. “More decorative blocks”, “more furniture”, “more mobs”, “QOL tweaks”, “dimension mod that is essentially an excuse to add new blocks and mobs and nothing else”, “biome overhaul/biome mod”. 

Want to find a magic mod? Tough shit. You get incredibly, incredibly basic magic mods. Or, you get things entirely unbalanced for multiplayer. Or its literally just “here’s another new oretype past netherite thats OP as hell and doesn’t’ actually change gameplay.”. It’s like people don’t know how to make mods that aren’t just decorative or making the player overpowered.

And then you look at Forge, and you see the wild shit that they have going on there. And I know that a part of it is that forge has been around for much longer and thus has a lot more experienced devs on it that can do crazy shit, but there’s still that part of me that’s just sad.

From thaumcraft to electroblob’s wizardry, we just don’t see this in fabric.  Except for this guy trying to bring thaumcraft over to fabric as practice big props to this guy me and my friends are quietly cheering him on.

Moving on- Forge is the modloader for people who want complexity in their gameplay. Who want a different gameplay experience from vanilla.

Forge is for experienced players, and focused groups. Forge is generally, not great for easy youtube or stream content, nor is it good for pleasing a general audience. It’s not great for servers that have varying skill levels of play, because by adding complex content (and often difficulty enhancing) mods you alienate the players that aren’t as good at the game. This doesn’t make forge worse, however, but it makes it visibly different when you’re looking to mod your game. 

Now, to talk about the elephant in the room, forge is perpetually stuck at 1.12 for the most part. There’s some movement and there’s some newer ones at 1.18 and 1.19, but a majority of known forge mods are for 1.12 and below. This further adds to the feeling that forge is for experienced players that seek gameplay different from vanilla, because those kinds of players would mind the older versions a lot less compared to someone who is less experienced and thus wouldn’t be so inclined to seek gameplay that differs from vanilla- because they haven’t experienced vanilla as much!

When you look at the repertoire of forge modpacks and forge mods, so many of them are big, gameplay changing mods, and nearly all forge modpacks make sure to include them too, meaning that you are stuck at older versions. 

Now, back in the day I didn’t mind this very much as I primarily played singleplayer. But now that I mainly play multiplayer with my friends, this is painfully noticeable. My friends dont’ want to play older versions! And that’s perfectly understandable. But that means we’re forced to stick to fabric, because ultimately fabric has the most mods for latest and updates the fastest, and they prefer being on latest! And honestly I don’t want to play on older  versions all the time too because certain recent updates sure were good!! And there’s no way to play on latest *and* have those gameplay changing mods that would make my gameplay more interesting *while* having the latest update on.

And I think that’s really just the main point of that whole debate. Forge players would love to update, but they can’t because of how slow it all is. And that’s not the fault of the forge modders or the modloader, because development teams all work differently. And telling them to move to fabric isn’t going to cut it, because fabric lacks the things they want, and being told to move to fabric and abandon the things you like and care about because “fabric is better” when it does not fulfil the things you want in a modded game is annoying, and shows a lack of understanding of why they even play those older versions and mods in the first place.

The weird war between forge and fabric is not because one is inherently better than the other, its because people don’t understand that one does not appeal to the other because it’s lacking what the former had.

And SURE. Fabric has a great repertoire of mods, but as I mentioned before- A majority of it is vanilla+. And if you’re a years-long forge player with the wildest and most complex modpacks, vanilla+ wont make you happy no matter how many of those mods are there.

That’s essentially the end of my ramblings. Hope it was comprehensible at any point lmao.

#minecraft #mineblr #mc tag #modded mc #dirtcube chat #this was mainly sprung from how badly i want thaumcraft to be on fabric okay #tomcraft is the only thing keeping my hopes up #also it'd be nice if electroblob's wizardry and ars nouveau could get official fabric ports but i doubt we'll be seeing that anytime soon #at least fabric is starting to get more tech mods now so that category #is no longer so empty #but the magic category is so empty and devoid still #q