Notes

Utilizing Bazel to Create Minecraft Modpacks – Evan Pratten

Back in 2012, I began to get involved to Minecraft mod development, and soon after I created an almost-plain client-side modpack for myself that mainly contained rendering as well as UI and quality-of-life modifications. While this modpack wasn't named or published, it was maintained for many years until I quit playing Minecraft in 2016 using Minecraft 1.9. I had gotten so used to the features of this modpack, that playing purely vanilla Minecraft did not feel right to me.



Recently, a few friends invited me to join their private Minecraft server even though I had not touched the game for around four years, I decided to join. It was a mistake on their part since they now have the privilege of someone who used the original 1.6.4 and is constantly asking questions about it. I'm beginning to get used to the very weird new collection of blocks that have been completely overhauled in the command system, the overly complicated combat system, and a brand new rendering system that makes everything "look odd".



One important thing was missing, however I was wondering where my modpack was? I set out to rebuild my modpack and finally gave it a name, CorePack. Not much has changed, a lot of the same rendering and UI mods are still in place, along with the identical GLSL shaders, and the same textures. However, I did choose to take a "major step" and switch from the Forge Mod Loader to the Fabric Loader, since I prefer Fabric's API.
FAXYS'S


Curseforge & Bazel



I don't remember Curseforge existing in the past, when I played often. It's a significant improvement over PlanetMinecraft forums, as it provides a simple method to find information about published Minecraft mods, and offers an API! Luckily, after switching the modpack to Fabric and discovered that every mod I was looking for was available through curse (although, it seems NEI is now a thing of the past).



My primary goal for the new version of CorePack was to design it in such a way I could make a CI pipeline generate new releases for me when mods are updated. This involves pulling information about mods, and their JAR files using the buildsystem script. Since this project requires working with a huge amount of data from various external sources, I've decided to use Bazel, a buildsystem that excels in these types of projects.



While Curseforge is an user-friendly API to work with mod data, @WynPrice (a co-developer of mods) has put together an amazing project called Curse Maven which I decided to use instead. Curse Maven is an API that is server-less and functions exactly like my Ultralight project. Any Curse Maven request for artifacts will be redirected to Curseforge Maven, and served without me having to find the long-form artifact identifiers internally using curse.



Curse Maven makes it easy to load a mod (in this instance, fabric-api) into Bazel.



The above snippet uses a Bazel ruleset developed by Square, Inc. called bazel_maven_repository.



Modpack configuration



Two sets of configuration files are needed for my pack to function with MultiMC. The first set informs MultiMC what versions of LWJGL and Minecraft to use. The second set includes the in-game configuration files. A lot of these files contain information I'd like to modify from Bazel during the modpack build step. Starlark's library core includes an action called expand_template.


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