Kilt

A Fabric mod that brings (Neo)Forge mods into the Fabric ecosystem. Very experimental.

FAQ

Why?

I like Fabric. And I hate Forge. More reasons here.

Download?

First, you must understand that Kilt is currently highly unstable, may break worlds, may cause crashes, hence why it is currently published as Alpha to Modrinth and Beta to CurseForge.

If you encounter any bugs or crashes, do not report them to the mod developers unless they also occur on Forge. Instead, report them onto the Kilt issue tracker, if a similar issue does not exist.

Now that that's out of the way, the download link may be accessed from the GitHub Actions page for nightly builds, and a quick access download link may be found in the Discord (#rules-and-info), which also always downloads the latest build.

You may also download it from Modrinth or CurseForge for more "stable" release builds.

What about updating/backporting to other versions of Minecraft?

While updates to newer versions are planned, Kilt is an incredibly large undertaking for only two people to work on. A NeoForge 1.21.1 build is currently in progress, however that is going to take some time. Afterwards, we are able to move forward onto the latest version of Minecraft. Anything in-between and earlier is going to be unsupported, however someone else may take on that role instead.

What about Patchwork?

Patchwork has completely halted development, which means it will not be updated to modern versions of Minecraft past 1.16. Kilt has also far surpassed Patchwork in its development, and both Patchwork and Kilt had shared different goals despite being for accomplishing the same thing.

What about Connector?

Connector's aim is to have Fabric mods on (Neo)Forge, while Kilt aims to have Forge mods on Fabric. Isn't it reasonable to just have both?

Also, contrary to popular belief, Kilt and Connector started around similar times. When Kilt started being developed, Connector did not exist.

Kilt's development began on the 29th of December 2022, whereas Connector's development started on the 26th of May 2023 (as confirmed by Su5ed himself).

Okay... so how does this work?

Basically this recreates FML in a way that functions with Fabric Loader, with some of its own changes to hopefully improve on its performance, and bridging together Forge APIs with Fabric-native APIs for the sake of compatibility. Additionally, the entire Forge API is already bundled within Kilt, it just relies on the patch re-implementations (known as "injects" in Kilt's codebase) to be created first in mixin form.

For making the Forge mods themselves work, Kilt first remaps them from the Forge SRG format into Fabric's Intermediary format, then applies some of its own "fixers" to ensure that everything will work correctly in the Fabric environment.

How have you not lost your sanity doing this?

Already have. Next question.

Credits & Acknowledgements

I want to give a huge amount of thanks to the Fabricators of Create for making Porting Lib, as without it, this would have been significantly harder to do.

Thank you to the Minecraft Forge developers, cpw and LexManos, and all of its contributors, for making the Forge API, and having it open-sourced.

Thank you to the FabricMC developers, modmuss50, sfPlayer1, and asiekierka, for creating Fabric.

And thank you to my friend Zuite, for being the wall that I throw all my code frustrations and thought processes at, as she has helped me tremendously to just stop and think about all of the problems at hand.