Architectury Loom vs CurseForge Gradle Publish Plugin

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.

CurseForge Gradle Publish Plugin publishes build artifacts to CurseForge from a Gradle build. A publication can specify a CurseForge project ID, main artifact, game versions, display name, release type, changelog, and artifact relationships. It uses the CurseForge Upload API and needs an API token in the plugin’s curseforge extension. The README warns that keeping the token in a version-controlled build script can expose it; user-specific Gradle properties are suggested instead.

For mod projects, the plugin can derive publication details from other tools. With Fabric Loom and a remapJar or jar bundling task, it can create a publication preconfigured for Fabric and the targeted Minecraft version. Its ModDevGradle and NeoGradle integrations can infer NeoForge and Minecraft-version details. When Gradle’s java-base plugin is present, it infers the Java version from the compileJava target.