Develop your first addon

Set up your development environment

1. Grab the VS Addon Template! You can get it from its releases page. Make sure to grab the latest release.

   • (Grab the FORGE zip if you only wish to develop for Forge, or the MULTILOADER zip if you wish to develop for Fabric & Forge simultaneously.)

2. Unzip the template to a folder of your choice.

3. Open the project in your preferred IDE (IntelliJ IDEA is strongly recommended).

4. Import the Gradle project when prompted.

5. Wait for Gradle to finish downloading dependencies. This can take a minute or two on the first run.

Once it's setup, you're good to go! Now, onto the basics of your addon itself.

Namespace / Mod ID

This template's default namespace/mod ID is "vs_template"- you'll likely want to change this!

You can do so by altering the following files:

• Change the base package name in settings.gradle.kts

• Change the name and id variables in gradle.properties

• Change the MOD_ID in VSTemplateMod.kt in the common module

• Edit the mods.toml file in src/main/resources/META-INF/ in the forge module

• Edit the fabric.mod.json file in src/main/resources/ in the fabric module

You should also rename anything prefixed with "VSTemplate" to your mod's name!

If you are using IntelliJ, it is reccomended to refactor in your IDE rather than changing the file name in file explorer, as it will automatically edit the references to the old name to match your new one.

Understanding Dependencies

In this mod's gradle.properties file, you will find a few properties that define the versions of each dependency this project has, including VS2 and its core. You can change these properties to update dependency versions easily across the entire project, without having to edit buildscripts!

Most dependencies have some easy way to discover the latest/reccomended version to depend on. Valkyrien Skies itself is similar! The vs_core_version property should be equal to the identically named property in the Valkyrien Skies Github Repo, and the vs2_version is the mod version, followed by the first 10 characters of the latest commit hash.

You can find the most recent retrievable version of VS easily by going to the Packages tab for Fabric or Forge!

Building and Running

Before running the mod after each change made, it is recommended to run the ./gradlew clean task in your command line, followed by clicking the sync button in the top right. This ensures the files built are up to date with your code changes.

Alternatively to gradle clean, you can also manually delete your build folders. This is helpful if that task fails, for whatever reason.

Mod Structure

This mod template uses a multiloader structure, with 3 modules:

• common: This module contains code shared between both Fabric and Forge. This is where the majority of your mod's code should go!

• fabric: This module contains code specific to the Fabric loader. This includes the Fabric mod initializer, and any Fabric-specific implementations of common code.

• forge: This module contains code specific to the Forge loader. This includes the Forge mod class, and any Forge-specific implementations of common code.

Within each module, you will find 3 primary submodules:

• src/main/java: This is where Java code goes. This is primarily used for Mixins, as Mixins cannot be written in Kotlin. You may also choose to relocate your primary mod files here, and not use Kotlin at all if you wish.

• src/main/kotlin: This is where Kotlin code goes. VS is primarily written in Kotlin, so it tends to be easier to work with VS when also writing in Kotlin.

• src/main/resources: This is where resources go, such as Forge's mods.toml, Fabric's fabric.mod.json, mod assets, and data files.

Using the VS Api

You can access the VS Core Api statically through ValkyrienSkies.api (with parenthesis for a method call in Java). The API's javadocs contain tons of extra information on how to use each part of it, so give them a read!

Additionally, there are a few features in VS2 itself- such as BlockEntityPhysicsListener - that you may want to use.