Moving back to Fabric
19 Sep 2024Oh boy, here we go again. Why am I moving back to Fabric after deciding to switch to Quilt over a year ago?
When Quilt originally came to be, I followed its beginnings carefully, I researched the drama that led to its split from Fabric, as well as what their plan was to maintain the loader in the future. I still strongly believe to this day that Quilt had incredible potential: I knew a good amount of the people on the team, and I frequently saw said people pour hours of their free time and skill to shape up new systems that would shake up Minecraft modding for the better and genuinely bring some good new tools to the table. And with all of that combined with a genuine will to make the modding community more inclusive and welcoming, I decided to get on board. However, the problem is that both of these didn’t really stick in the long term.
For the technological aspect, for a long time, Quilt had some added tools Fabric didn’t have. For instance, the one that really triggered the switch for me was the multipart API, that allowed me to make the Freebird have a more complex hitbox than Minecraft allows by default. Hell, to this day, Quilt still has an upper hand in some areas, but they are often ones I don’t end up using much if at all in the grand scheme of things, which doesn’t really justify me using Quilt specifically for these tools. Additionally, progress on a lot of the advancements I was excited for gradually slowed down to what seems to be, today, a standstill.
For the community aspect, it’s a similar story. While Quilt was originally looking positively welcoming and had an emphasis on its community aspect, that very often led into drama, time and time again. Without getting into details too much, incidents sparked by representatives of the loader were very frequent, and while said representatives have now left the loader and the community, the damage has already been done.
But the final nail in the coffin for me is its usability and uncertainness. While modding for Quilt, I’ve encountered build issues like never before. Now don’t get me wrong, those come with the hobby, and I’ve had countless on Fabric too. But under Quilt, I wouldn’t be able to work on a single project without encountering a build issue at least once or twice that would take me hours to resolve, even with very skilled people helping me. And with its nature of constantly making technical changes to improve the loader, I’ve also very often had issues with simply loading a development environment I haven’t worked on in a month, and it completely breaking without me having changed a single file.
All of that to say that for me, it’s gotten to a point where I just simply no longer enjoy modding for Quilt. That doesn’t mean I necessarily think it’s inferior, but I personally would like to go back to the simplicity of Fabric. Again, this is a hobby: I mod for myself above everything, and I generally don’t care what people think of me or my silly choices, but I figured that some would appreciate a little more insight into my choice, so here it is.
Have a lovely day and much ratty love 🐀❤️