I've started work on a custom furnace which I will later expand into other machines. Although I've already been able to make a new furnace, it still uses a lot of the vanilla furnace code.

What I want to know is, will I need to pass packets around containing updates for the tile entity? If so, how often, should I send a packet from the server to the clients every time the itemBurnTime of my furnace changes?

As often as you need to keep the two sides sufficiently synchronised for your purposes.

 

The vanilla furnace sends progress updates every tick while the furnace is burning. However, it cheats a bit and only does this while a GUI is open. It gets away with that because the only reason the client needs to know about the internal state of the furnace is for displaying the GUI. If it's the same for your machine, you can do likewise.

 

If you need to keep the sides synchronised at other times, you may want to be more selective, and send updates only for important events that the client needs to know about, such as when it finishes working on an item. The details will depend on your machine.

My machine works a lot like the furnace so I'll update its progress only when the GUI is open or if it runs out of fuel and the block texture needs to change, thanks for help!

Oh, what's the best way to go about receiving the packets. I've built a packet handler to receive my packets, but how should the handler update the specific tile entity. Should I send the: world, x, y ,z vars and get the tile entity to then send the updated info to that tile entity be best, or is there a more recommended way?