Bringing Quilt into the non-obfuscated era

A bomb has been dropped on the modding community: In October last year, Mojang announced that, beginning with the snapshots for Minecraft 26.1, Minecraft’s code will no longer be obfuscated. For those who don’t know what that means, for Minecraft’s whole lifetime its code has been “obfuscated”, or scrambled to make it more difficult to read. From 26.1 onwards, modders will have access to the complete, unscrambled code that Mojang developers do, which is a fundamental change for how mods are made. Until now, projects like Mod Coder Pack (MCP), Quilt Mappings (QM), and Yarn have provided “mappings” to make the obfuscated code readable, and Mojang even offers a set of mappings themselves. However, now that the code isn’t obfuscated in the first place, mapping projects are no longer needed. Thus, it is with heavy hearts that we, the Quilt admin team, declare that Quilt Mappings will no longer be maintained for new Minecraft versions. But also YAYYYY more time for other projects! This post is an overview of the changes we’re planning to make to Quilt so that we can move into the non-obfuscated era with our characteristic poise and elegance.

Quilt Mappings

As we stated in the intro, QM will not be released for any future versions of Minecraft, although we will still accept contributions for older versions. This doesn’t mean that mapping projects as a whole are over, though! We sort of lied when we said that the mappings are complete. They’re missing one important aspect of the code: the developer documentation. The Parchment project intends to continue releasing documentation for newer versions, and you might just see a few of our team members helping out there.

Those more familiar with mappings will know that we spend a lot of time building software and libraries to help us keep up with Minecraft’s constant updates, and the end of QM doesn’t mean the end of all that great work! Our technology is still going to be used in documenting Minecraft, legacy modding projects, and even mapping efforts outside of Minecraft, so we don’t intend to let QM’s software ecosystem die with it. Even beyond user numbers, the team is passionate about our software, and we want to keep building it. The primary project for the Mappings team will now be Enigma, the program we used to make mappings for Minecraft. Enigma’s development has been going strong since Quilt was born, with our huge version 2.7 having just come out and the possibly even bigger 2.8 in development right now.

Unfortunately, the story isn’t quite so happy for the rest of our mappings tooling. Much of it is no longer worth maintaining in an un-obfuscated world, such as our version of Unpick that was forked from Daomephsta and Fabric’s original. We’ll be archiving all of our smaller forked mappings libraries like Unpick, Stitch, Tiny Remapper, and more. Our original work, such as Hasher and Javadoc Draftsman, will go into maintenance mode for the foreseeable future, receiving only important fixes. Our experimental, unfinished replacement for much of the Mappings tooling, Quilt Mapping Tools, will no longer see any new work from us either. For those who used the tools listed in this paragraph, this shouldn’t be a big surprise. None of these have received major updates in the last couple of years, and we’re largely just formalizing the status that these projects have been in for a long time.

Quilt Standard Libraries and other APIs

Quilt maintains 3 different API mods for Minecraft: Quilt Standard Libraries, Quilt Kotlin Libraries, and Quilted Fabric API. We (your hardworking admin board) have decided to officially retire all three of these libraries in Minecraft 26.1. However, they will still receive maintenance updates on older versions, and we are investigating porting some their innovations we made back to Fabric API so that they can be used by more modders. We have two main reasons to make this change. Recently, the work to maintain these libraries has largely fallen on one sole developer, Oro (everyone say thank you oro!), who has been unable to commit enough time to make sure that they are quickly brought to newer versions. Secondly, the design of QSL as incompatible with FAPI, which allowed us more space to innovate and make more powerful APIs, has proven to be extremely difficult to maintain long-term. Our compatibility layer between the two, QFAPI, is confusing for users and cumbersome for developers, leading to slow updates and users dropping off Quilt. This has been the state of Quilt’s libraries for long enough that we’re officially retiring them in order to make Quilt more user-friendly.

We still believe that our libraries are great projects that succeeded in their goal to innovate and improve the modding ecosystem, and we’re happy with the work we did. Nonetheless, they have served their purpose, and we’re excited to focus on other aspects of Quilt.

Other Projects

Several of our other projects are going to see some changes as well. We are officially retiring the CHASM project, our concept for a more conflict-resistant system for modifying Java code. While it has seen a lot of progress in its implementation, and a prototype is working, enough of its use cases have been covered by an alternative project, MixinExtras, that we’ve decided to stop looking for a developer to finish the project. There were a few core flaws in its design (you can read this post by a former Quilt developer if you’d like to learn more!) that made completing the implementation extremely difficult, and we’d rather help to improve the existing tooling than continue with CHASM.

Our developer wiki is also going to see major changes. We originally envisioned a system where articles would be written with code from real, automatically tested projects, guaranteeing that the code was valid and up-to-date for the latest version of Minecraft. Now that we are no longer maintaining version-dependent modding APIs, the benefits of such a system are far more limited, so we plan to migrate to a simpler and more accessible wiki that’s better integrated with our main site, using more standard frameworks and less original code to simplify development. This new wiki will be the central location for all documentation on Quilt Config, Quilt Loader, Enigma, and more. Work hasn’t yet begun on this move, but contributions and ideas are always welcome!

In terms of our community, we’ve been working on a refresh to the website to go along with this announcement. That new website is live now, including rewritten documentation, a new homepage, and more! We’ve been working on this in private for a while, and we’re excited for you to see it. We would also like to announce that our previous keyholder has stepped down from the role for personal reasons, and the admin board and community team have elected to retire the old version of the role and give keyholder duties to an Admin Board member instead. The new keyholder will be Rai, as you may have noticed from the little crown beside her name in our Discord server.

Quilt Loader

Finally, let’s talk about Quilt’s flagship project, and one that is only going to be receiving more attention in the future. Our goal for Quilt Loader is to make it a modern, user-friendly loader that makes sense for users who have never played modded Minecraft before. Let’s talk about how we’re planning to do that! There are two key areas of friction for new players: updates and crashes.

The first issue is updates. For a user, there is generally no reason to update their loader unless the game crashes. In that case, they have to decipher the error to figure out that an update is needed, and work out that in order to update they have to return to the installer and overwrite their current version. This means two things: most users aren’t getting access to our new features as we update Loader, and users are confused and frustrated when a crash forces them to update.

Our solution is simple: implement an optional automatic update checker that will let users know when a stable version is out, and be able to update loader without interrupting your game launch or forcing you to interact with the installer. We’ve already laid much of the foundation for this feature, and we welcome any feedback you might have!

The second issue is game crashes. For a lot of users, modded Minecraft is their first exposure to a program crash, and first time they see a stack trace. We want QLoader to help users understand the crash (something we’ve already put quite a bit of work into with solver improvements and GUI updates!), and in the future we want to allow the loader interface to help you fix crashes. We’ll be offering at least two solutions to common crashes in the UI:

• Offering stable or beta updates to loader when it or Fabric Loader is out-of-date. This will be simple once we get our automatic updating working!
• Creating overrides to fix dependency issues, making sure that overrides are obvious in the UI and logs to avoid users sending error reports for mods they’ve overridden. We also have a couple more ambitious ideas, which may or may not end up in Quilt Loader. We want to make sure we get them right! Here are a few of them:
• Disabling mods involved in the crash
• Offering updates to mods involved in a crash, and possibly dependencies (remember that a very large group of users are on the vanilla launcher, and there’s no Prism reminding them), with a quick one-time warning to ensure the user understands that they’re downloading unverified third-party software
• And more! These are just a few simple ideas, and there’s lots of potential for Loader to non-destructively make attempts to diagnose and fix crashes, and we’d love to hear more feedback. Our goal isn’t to fix every crash automatically, but we want to simplify mod management for more knowledgeable users and help newer users learn to fix simple crashes in a more intuitive way than being expected to read pages of documentation. If we can fix just a few crashes using these methods, those are a few users who are having a way better experience playing modded Minecraft!

Beyond this, we have a few long-awaited features we continue to work on for Loader, such as our Loader Plugins system for allowing developers more control over Loader’s behaviour (there are already some interesting plugins in the works, like Quilt Bisect!). Keep in mind that we’re volunteers, and we develop this project as a passion, not as a job. We won’t be committing to release dates for anything mentioned in this post, but we’re always working to get new features out for you, our beloved players and developers. See you soon!