Difficulty with a forge mod

Hello to all,

I was going to make a post under modder support, but after some consideration, this seemed like a better call. Apologies if this post does not belong here though.

To start, I am fully willing to admit I am way in over my head here, so if someone wants to just point me in the right direction in order to actually start doing things properly rather than trying to fix this mess I created, I understand and appreciate it.

If you have any suggestions, I would grateful to hear them! Thank you for your time!

Basically, I am working on a modpack for some friends of mine and myself which I plan to make very difficult, but hopefully not too tedious. One of the ways that I intend to do that is by adding backpacks that are small. I found the mod "Useful Backpacks" by U Team and it seemed great, but the backpacks were just too big. So I downloaded and modified the source code to make them smaller, and it worked out great! The backpacks were way smaller and I could test them out fine by running the forge version client (it is a multiloader setup). However, when I went to publish the mod, I could not for the life of me get it to publish. Whenever I tried to, it throws the error "Publishing artifacts is only allowed when property createBuild is supplied." Digging around in the gradle files lead me to find that the setup was seemingly never mean to output a local file, but rather to publish directly to mod sites and Github (I think). Despite my attempts to tinker with the gradle files to add local publishing and strip out as much (hopefully) unneeded code (for forge) as possible, I still have not been able to get it to publish (still runs the client though).

This was a bit of a surprise as I had tinkered with some other mods and had no issues publishing them before.

Attempt number two saw me trying to rebuild the project in a separate directory after outputting an archive of the desired branch. By merging the files from "common" into the forge directory along with the core mod files I saw some progress, but also plenty of errors. Needless to say, that did not go far, but I did try a few times.

Which leads me to attempt number three. I decided that rather than trying to modify existing code directly, that it might be best to try and make an addon mod that changes a very small amount of code in Useful Backpacks. I was able to import the mod as a dependency, so I can call on files from the original mod. Sadly the one java file I need to modify is a public enum so no directly overriding that (I think). Instead I figured I would just override everything that calls it instead and point the new files to my own public enum. Would this even work? Does this make any sense? No idea! Regardless, it shows some promise I believe, but it still is giving me a bit of a rough time.

I still have some other ideas: do attempt two again but import the core files instead of directly adding them, mess around with the gradle files from the original project some more, etc etc.

Honestly, at this point I wonder if I should just make my own backpack mod from scratch.

That is basically it. Hopefully whoever is reading this is not cradling his or her head in pain right now. I have learned quite a bit from the constant failures so I think I will figure this out at some point.

Thank you once more for your time!

Info:

MC: 1.20.1

Forge: 47.2.20 or 47.4.0

(depends on whether I am using the latest version or the one used in the Useful backpacks' source code)

Useful Backpacks: 2.0.1

Mapping Channel: parchment

Mapping Version: 2023.09.03-1.20.1

OS: Arch Linux x86

IDE: VSCodium

Logs:

Attempt one: https://pastebin.com/i23fbxTW

The one java file I need to modify (modified): https://pastebin.com/71uYJhP2

(I also need to modify three image files, but I figure that should be no issue)

Edited 3 hours ago3 hr by NewIron