Changing Minecraft's core mechanics

[broede]

So I'd like to make some changes to how certain things work.  For instance, one of the major things I went over in the last two months with some help from this forum was how to render a new custom fluid, customizing all the effects such as how the fluid looks while inside of it, how monsters respond to it, etc.  I created a fluid called "sludge" which is basically like green water, but it is needed for certain crops to grow.  Now, if I used Material.water, then it behaves exactly like water and I can't make it behave like I want.  If I try adding a custom fluid the Forge way, it might behave like a fluid in some ways, but I can't get things like custom drip colors, custom fog rendering, custom sunset recoloring, and so forth.  The only way I could get it to work was to add my own fluid at the base class level.  But, I cannot get it to work outside of the Eclipse IDE -- from what I've read, you can't *actually* change core Minecraft mechanics because they... I don't know, reset?

 

I know what 99% of the people who might read this is going to say... don't edit base classes.  I am aware of the perils of that when it comes to making a mod work with others, but the mod I'm working on will be an all-in-one mod for myself and some friends, so I can't even begin to care about that as a problem.  Is it at all possible to make this happen?  There's a lot about the game that I'd like to tweak and have fun with to bring an extra dimension of fun, so I can squeeze another year or so out of Minecraft before it gets too old hat.

 

Thanks and have a great evening.

[broede]

So the best way to do this would be to learn how to do these transformers and use them to add custom hooks, is that what I'm gathering?  Do you know of any comprehensive tutorials for Transformers?