In the past, i'm used to working with 1.6 and 1.7, using mcp standalone, without forge. I have some basic understanding of how forge works, and most of my issues so far have been with the lack of documentation regarding forge classes and events and stuff not being up-to-date in the slightest. (most documentation seems to have been last updated several years ago.)

 

What i want to do:

 

Make blocks drop multiple different (non-block) items based on the tools they were harvested with.

 

(ex. toolA drops 4 of object A, toolB drops 4 of object B.)

 

There are like seventeen 'onharvest' 'onharvestbyplayer' 'onblockbreak' 'onblockharvest' and similar methods that all appear synonymous with eachother. In the past, i've been able to just go to minecraft.block or whatever and read the code, in order to understand what the methods are each used for. But this seems to have been made impossible with forge.

There's nothing stopping you from reading the Minecraft and Forge code in your IDE if you've set up your workspace correctly. This page explains how to do that.

 

In most cases, you can override

Block#getDrops

(or the vanilla methods called by it) to control the drops of a block; but this doesn't give you access to the player who broke the block or the tool they used to break it.

 

The best way to have drops vary based on the tool used to break the block is probably to subscribe to

BlockEvent.HarvestDropsEvent

, check the block is yours, check which tool the player is holding and add the appropriate drops to the event's drop list.

There's also

public boolean removedByPlayer(IBlockState state, World world, BlockPos pos, EntityPlayer player, boolean willHarvest)

or

public void harvestBlock(World worldIn, EntityPlayer player, BlockPos pos, IBlockState state, @Nullable TileEntity te, @Nullable ItemStack stack)

?