Spot on. You can also play Bedrock on a PC if that's your poison.

Yes, it's night and day as I said. Take the most fundamental naming element of Compact Claustrophobia - the Compact Machine. This is a block which has a pocket universe inside, we have to be able to make this, place it down, enter and exit, and have the inside of the block continue running because after all the outside is still here with us, and also the edges of the outside block correspond arbitrarily to portals inside the block for transmission of... oh right yeah, Bedrock doesn't even have a electrical power system...

With the approach they're taking in Bedrock maybe the Compact Machines I was first playing with years ago become possible (if somebody puts in a lot of labour) in ten years, or in twenty - if sanctioned. But they've existed for years in Java, so why bother?

It's not data-driven, it's still code-driven, just now the code is written in shitty-JSON-language. This is how the inner platform effect works. See also the configuration complexity clock [1].

[1] https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-comple...

I was just watching a cool video on "world gen modders" where the author demonstrated by tweaking just a few values in a custom JSON it was possible to create new kinds of landscapes. At least in their corner it seems like the JSON files are exactly what they want to use to achieve their goals.

well, just have a proper code-based API?

not even separate textures are necessary, you could very well use atlases and just stitch them together at runtime with rectpacking and just remap the input texcoords to the new, bigger atlas... boom, mod support with atlases without creating 400 2KB .png's in the game folder.

similarly, blocks can be done in code, and modders can either use that, and optionally you can expose the same API in LUA or whatever if you need a less involved / sandboxed version of mods which can be downloaded from a server or whatever.

Here's an example of shit being done from code, it's fairly terse and you don't need to trawl through 7 files to do anything: (yes I know it doesn't have i18n yet but that won't make it much more complex either)

    SHORT_GRASS = register(new Flower(Blocks.SHORT_GRASS, "Short Grass"));
    SHORT_GRASS.setTex(crossUVs(8, 1));
    SHORT_GRASS.setModel(BlockModel.makeGrass(SHORT_GRASS));
    SHORT_GRASS.transparency();
    SHORT_GRASS.shortGrassAABB();
    SHORT_GRASS.noCollision();
    SHORT_GRASS.waterTransparent();

For data files (textures, sounds and other assets) you could use a virtual filesystem like Quake did (PhysFS is a good library which vaguely approximates that) and get rid of the stupid amount of folder nesting specifying behaviour, you can just have toplevel folders and use modloader order to disambiguate.

tl;dr: almost anything can be made to work with the most convenient/most sensible method of making stuff instead of using a bunch of awkward and convoluted JSON files you aren't even using! (MC internally generates the JSONs from code, so the data lives through a code -> JSON -> code roundtrip, they aren't even dogfooding their own format lol)

Yes, but I'm not talking about pre-Forge modding. Anyway, Fabric enables similar mods without the conflicts (it's actually great. You can edit any piece of code without being limited to the hooks someone else chose to install for you. My first Fabric mod completely replaced how your inventory worked. It was installed on the modfest showcase server and drew lots of complaints.). Anyway, that's not what I'm talking about either.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6eNqSCTTKQ