I have a cooldown field which I want to reduce every tick, but I cannot do it with events (or atleast not the standard way of doing it). The reason for this is that the object I am creating (which is a completely different type of object compared to a block/blockstate, item/itemstack etc) needs to this particular object. If I subscribe the class to the event bus it with the annotation the method handling the event needs to be static. If I subscribe the class without the annotation it has to be a new object AFAIK, which is not possible for me. What other possibilities do I have?

While that would be possible in a normal case I don't want to do this here. I eventually want a HUD which will display the cooldown of the object, as well as change the HUD itself while it is on cooldown. It would be confusing for the player if it was only updated every time you tried to activate it rather than constantly.

You can still get the current value in the way that D7 said when drawing the hud.

What method should I use to tell the counter to save/update the time stored?

I see how you get the difference, but how do you actually make the game calculate the difference without a tick handler? Do I just query it when my hud updates or what?

I see. Thank you both for the help!