I was wondering if there is a simple way of storing a BlockState within an NBTTagCompound.

Write it as registry name + metadata. You can eventually serialize TileEntity if such exists at x/y/z.

 

As for registry names - you could go with block IDs but mind that those are assigned per-world so your save would have to be for specific world and no other use outside it.

 

If you have a large amount of blocks to serialize you can make local dictionary - make registry name have prive ID inside your NBT structure and then all blocks saved would use that dictionary reference to deserialize.

Okay, I can store the block now, but I cannot figure out how to get the BlockState back from the ID and metadata.  I can either the block from getBlockById, or the BlockState with getStateById, but I cannot figure out how to place that block in the world.  The only method I can find is world.setBlockState, but that doesn't use the block ID.

Don't use block IDs.

 

Get the block registry from

ForgeRegistries.BLOCKS

, the

Block

from its registry name by calling

IForgeRegistry#getValue

and then the

IBlockState

from the metadata by calling

Block#getStateFromMeta

.

Ok, I have it all sorted out.  I am currently using block IDs temporary until I can figure out a good way of storing the block registry in NBT as it is a ResourceLocation and cannot be simply casted to a string for easy storage.  Once I figure out how to store the registry, I will use that instead.

Store the registry name (and any other

ResourceLocation

) as a string, convert by calling

toString

. Use the

ResourceLocation(String)

constructor to convert the string back to a

ResourceLocation

.

I forgot that the constructor for a ResourceLocation just takes a string.  Thanks.