Minecraft is a sandbox independent video game originally created by Swedish programmer Markus "Notch" Persson and later developed and published by the Swedish company Mojang. The creative and building aspects of Minecraft allow players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D procedurally generated world. Other activities in the game include exploration, gathering resources, crafting, and combat. Multiple gameplay modes are available, including survival modes where the player must acquire resources to build the world and maintain health, a creative mode where players have unlimited resources to build with and the ability to fly, and an adventure mode where players play custom maps created by other players. - Wikipedia
For this course, the important thing to note is that Minecraft is developed in Java, meaning that we can use the skills we've developed in this course to extend the basic, or vanilla, game with mods. Luckily for us, an API has been developed to assist us in creating mods that work with other mods called Forge. Instead of changing the code Mojang wrote for the vanilla game, potentially creating conflicts with other mods, Forge provides programmatic hooks into Minecraft's code, allowing us to edit the game in a safe way.
Forge has a very straight forward API, however there are only easy setup tools available for the Eclipse IDE, not Netbeans. Eclipse is also widely used in the industry, so this will give us a good opportunity to use both. Additionally, Forge requires a very specific setup to allow mods to work, so you will need to pay attention to how and where mod components are put together.
We will be developing using Forge 1.7.10-10.13.2.1291 and Minecraft 1.7.10. The Forge version for Minecraft 1.8 is less stable, since 1.8 is still in development.