About GlobalLootModifier system

yesterday i decided to port a small mod of mine from 1.12 to 1.16. all in all it wasn't too difficult and took less than a day.

the part that gave me some headache was the GlobalLootModifier system and i want to share the headache with others.

i had the HarvestDrops event in the old branch and noticed it was killed off. simple internet search led me to a few pages on github and apparently this was a big problem and a big hole in forge for months. those days, looks like i would not have been able to port at all... and then i found the instructions about this new system....

so, draco made a thing. i expect people aren't united on whether it's an improvement and i won't go there. the important thing is - this new thing came with a documentation, proper documentation in proper place. plus the three quite different examples for the LootModifier class. documentation and examples? who does that? i made json files like draco said, made LootModifier like he said and the thing worked. it didn't feel like making a forge mod on a brand new version (for me) at all.

with positive item behind us, it was time for negative moments.

in short about the mod: HarvestDrops event is like this (in 1.12 language): loop through drops; for each item stack, if it belongs to the oredictionary group that starts with "gem", there is playersLuckLevel*10% chance to duplicate the item. that's all in there.

so first thing i saw was that loot context has a getLuck method. sweet. launch the game to try and - nope - context.getLuck returns 0.0 when i break a block even though i have luck III effect on me. that's a bug right? looks like a bug.

ok, there should be a player in this context, right? yep, found it. that worked, in terms of me getting a proper luck level, but revealed a few things. first issue was that LootManager.doApply triggers not just for block drops but also when a bat flies into lava or i kill a zombie. that is a bit of a problem for me - i need to spend the first half of doApply method to actually figure out what happened. only when i determine that a player has just mined a block, i can do my main code (outlined above). can we have some enumeration there as a parameter so we know what happened? it would be nicer and faster than every LootManager having to do type checks and casts to know what happened. what do you guys think?

also, turned out that getLuck method returns a correct luck value when i kill a zombie but incorrect one when i mine a block.

that is it for this rant/blog about my first day with 1.16. whoever actually read all of this, will get a sweet berry cookie from me.