Architectury Loom vs Blockbench

Architectury Loom is a free Gradle plugin for setting up development environments for Minecraft mods. It supports Fabric, Forge, NeoForge, and Quilt, and is described as a ForgeGradle replacement based on FabricMC Loom. Developers can choose Yarn, Official Mojang Mappings, or MCP mappings. Loom uses Fernflower and CFR to generate source code with comments. The documented IDE support is IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio Code; other IDEs are not tested or supported. The project requires Gradle 8.1 or newer and runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its documentation labels the project experimental and says issues may arise, with reports directed to the issue tracker. The repository uses the MIT license, and community discussion is available through Discord. The latest listed release is 1.17, which includes an API for converting access wideners to access transformers for Forge and NeoForge.

Blockbench is a free, open-source editor for making low-poly 3D models. Its tools support cuboid and mesh modeling, and users can create, edit, and paint textures in the program. Blockbench can generate a model's UV map and template, and connect to an external image editor or pixel-art program. For animation, it supports rigging, position, rotation, and scale keyframes, along with a graph editor. The built-in plugin store offers extensions such as tools, export formats, and model generators; users can also create plugins. Blockbench is available as a web app and on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. The project is licensed under the GPL. Its privacy policy says the software does not knowingly collect personally identifiable data, though it may collect anonymized usage information such as installation count. Local storage and cookies can remember preferences on a user's device. When users choose Model Sharing, model data is stored for the duration they select, and they can request earlier removal.