(1.16) When updating environment variables (PATH) is needed

[Daeruin]

I'm trying to write some tutorial/advice articles for Minecraft modding for 1.16. I'm a technical writer and have a few of my own mods under my belt. I've seen some older tutorials that tell you to add the path of your Java JDK installation to your environment variables. I don't recall having to do that when I started modding, and my general understanding is that the environment variables are mostly a convenience so you don't have to use the full path of an exe on the command line. So I was wondering if you really need to do anything with environment variables for modding and if so what situations it might be needed. Does it depend on your OS, JDK version, IDE, or what? TIA.

[ChampionAsh5357]

16 hours ago, Daeruin said:

So I was wondering if you really need to do anything with environment variables for modding and if so what situations it might be needed.

Not really. If you set up your JDK with no modifications, it will still point to the JDK. The path variable is pretty much just a list to which the first entry that matches the requirements will be chosen. If I had two JDKs for two different versions on the path, whichever one is at the highest priority or the top of the list will be chosen. On the other hand, I can force a specific JDK to be chosen using the JAVA_HOME environment variable which tells the program exactly where to look for the JDK. If at least one of these two are set, you should be able to mod with no issues. There is no real dependency on any underlying system for modding, just the JDK you are using (which should be 8 as that is what is shipped with vanilla).