NeoForge 20.2 for Minecraft 1.20.2

The first beta release of NeoForge for Minecraft 1.20.2 is now released. Please try it out, play with it, develop with it, and give us feedback! We are not stable yet, so expect a few breaking changes in the coming weeks.

For players, you can grab the latest installer directly from https://neoforged.net/.

For modders, the rest of this blog post is for you.


Versioning

NeoForge releases will be using the following version format going forward: <minecraft_minor>.<minecraft_patch>.<number>(-beta). This means that all releases for Minecraft 1.20.2 will be formatted as 20.2.*. The -beta tag indicates that the release is unstable and will likely have breaking changes between ’number’ versions.

According to this policy, the latest NeoForge version at the time of writing is 20.2.3-beta.

Toolchain Updates

We are now using MojMaps everywhere. This greatly simplifies the toolchain, streamlines mod building, allows debugging running modpacks, and many other benefits.

The Gradle plugin, now called NeoGradle, was largely rewritten, providing a large speedup to developers of mods and NeoForge, as well as many usability benefits. To migrate your buildscripts, please have look at the updated MDK.

We expect the new toolchain to be significantly easier to work with. If you need help, the #modder-support-1.20 on the Discord server is what you are looking for. As usual, please report any bug you might find so that we can fix it.

NeoForge Changes

All the packages have been changed to net.neoforged. We also renamed a few classes in NeoForge itself. Here is the full list of these renames.

If your mod is written in Java, you can use this remapping script to automatically apply the class and package renames.

The new modid for NeoForge is… neoforge. This means that you will have to update your mods.toml file, as well as any resource that might still refer to the forge modid.

A notable exception is tags, which are still under the forge namespace for now. We are coordinating with Fabric to provide a new convention shared by both loaders, but that will only be available starting from Minecraft 1.21.

Event System Changes

We made a number of improvements to the event system. You can read all about them in our dedicated blog post.

Minecraft Changes

Minecraft 1.20.2 itself comes with some changes. We will provider a primer / guide in the future.

Coming Soon

Before we can stabilize 20.2, there are a number of changes we want to make in the coming weeks.

We will be reworking our capability and registry systems to address longstanding issues. Expect your mod to break if you use them. If you are interested in the discussion, we encourage you to join our Discord server and look at the #brainstorming forum channel.

We will also be adjusting our networking hooks and protocol to account for the new configuration phase introduced by Mojang.

These are our big short-term plans, but we also welcome all kinds of smaller contributions. The breaking change window for NeoForge is now open, and we expect it to remain open for some time! Now is a great time to start working on your Pull Requests.

1.20.1 Plans

Our priority is to prepare for the future and improve NeoForge as much as possible for the years to come. This is only possible on the latest branch.

However, we will still be merging PRs targeted at the 1.20.1 branch as time allows, provided that they are also submitted to and accepted for the 1.20.2 branch.

Final Notes

Thanks to the team members who helped with the port. Thanks to the community who waited patiently for this release. Thanks to everyone who chooses to join us on this adventure. We look forward to continuing to improve NeoForge for you.