I've realized a major flaw in my item: every 1200 ticks, it does something (this thing doesn't matter in this context). I check if 12000 ticks happened by using a NBT value that updates every tick using the method OnUpdate.

 

It works nicely, but sadly the item will make the weird animation where it just goes up and down every tick. I believe this is due to the NBT being updated (or set if you want)

 

I hope someone knows what I'm talking about

Item#shouldCauseReequipAnimation

I'm litteraly facepalming rn.

When overriding that method, make sure to still return true for some cases, e.g.

@Override
public boolean shouldCauseReequipAnimation(ItemStack oldStack, ItemStack newStack, boolean slotChanged) {
return !ItemStack.areItemsEqual(oldStack, newStack); // maybe also add || slotChanged
}

A better solution, however, is to avoid updating NBT every tick and instead store the world time at which the next event should happen, then simply compare the current time against the NBT each tick:

// whenever time should be set:
long next = world.getTotalWorldTime() + 12000;
stack.getTagCompound().setLong('nextWhatever', next);

// checking each tick:
if (world.getTotalWorldTime() > stack.getTagCompound().getLong('nextWhatever')) {
// do whatever you need to do, then set the next time again

Not only will you not have to bother with shouldCauseReequipAnimation, but it is also more efficient as you only write to NBT once per cycle, rather than every single tick.

Well, if we are talking about BEST ways - the one is to use damn @Capability.

 

Timestamps are not dimension-safe and still require NBT interactions. Caps don't (only once).