How can I change a hardcoded number (noob here)

[Greenhound]

So a long time back (2-3 years) I messed around with MCP and I enjoyed the fact I could modify the majority of the source code at liberty, though I never got good at modding I enjoyed playing around changing values and properties of certain blocks (for example giving dirt the prickly quality of cactus)

 

Today I was trying to write a help guide book with heavily formatted text when I discovered the 256 character limit of books in vanilla minecraft.

 

I looked up a few mods, and none of them really solved the problem (the 'revise' book editor mod doesn't properly display formatting and so it was useless for my purpose).

 

I thought, how hard can it be to delve once again into the source code, find the value 256 in relation to the book GUI and change it to 512.

 

Now being someone who hasn't touched any mods except optifine since 1.1, I was surprised to see MCP was discontinued and replaced with something called Minecraft Forge. I watched a few tutorials on youtube and it appears it no longer allows you to modify the source code, but rather write extensions to the source.

 

I found the original minecraft source code within the 'Referenced Libraries' as the forge .jar file, and I found the exact reference to the number '256' hardcoded into the source that I needed to solve my problem, yet the source was uneditable and I can't change it to 512 and I'd have no way of compiling it even if I could.

 

Is there a function within the source API that lets you simply change a number like this?

 

I am a noob and have no intentions of making large mods, but this would be really helpful.

[david476]

Look into what were called core mods. Don't know how to do it off hand.

[Kwibble]

Reflection could also be used (I think). Don't ask me how, but you could. It all depends on how often you are wanting to access that one variable.