A key part you're missing either willfully or ignorantly is that they're midway through the refactoring to make it data driven, so you have these odd/rough edges.

Yes, having to declare json files for your new block in your mod is a pain...

Meanwhile what it was built for, resource packs, this actually gives a good amount of power to the pack maker without having to ask the client to run untrusted java code.

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immibis 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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...

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accrual 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	immibis 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It was like that when it was in Java, too. Just tweak just a few values in a custom Java class. Plus you could be as weird as you wanted instead of limited to a very rigid format. You weren't limited to tweaking values. You can still override it in Java code instead of tweaking values, but it's much more painful because all the existing code is geared towards reading the tweakable values.