I think adding a block tick event to Forge would be very helpful. I've been wanting to create a mod that adds a dynamic ecosystem to Minecraft. Part of that ecosystem would be plants spreading. After leaving a house in the countryside alone for some time, you might return to find weeds have sprouted in your yard and vines and trees popped up around the property. In order to make this work without replacing vanilla blocks entirely, however, a block tick event would be great for handling code like this, or any other applications.

 

Thanks.

There is not a specific 'block tick' function because that would just spam the event handlers.

The practice for changing vanilla behavior is to replace the block itself if you're gunna be the one taking over the block.

What you may also want to do is just make your own weeds and stuff as those are not in vanilla at all.

Perhaps just use the world tick to tick one or two blocks per chunk and go that route.

There is already a mod that does exactly what you're saying I can't remember the exact name but it may be worth looking into.

Thing you might want to check out is scheluded block ticks.

 

For good example look at BlockCrops#updateTick, many don't know about those.