Architectury Loom vs Fabric

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.

Fabric is a free, modular mod loader for Minecraft, with tools for playing and building mods. The Fabric Loader download supplies the basic loader; most mods also need Fabric API in the mods folder for the extra APIs they use. Players can install through options including Minecraft Launcher, Minecraft Server, MultiMC, CurseForge, GDLauncher, ATLauncher, MCUpdater, Technic, portablemc, and Metadata API. For developers, Fabric offers an online template generator, project templates, command-line tools, and an example mod repository. Fabric Loom is a Gradle plugin for developing and debugging mods. Its wider toolchain includes Yarn, open Minecraft mappings offered under CC0; Intermediary, which provides match information for cross-version mods; and Tiny Remapper for JAR files. Documentation covers player installation and troubleshooting as well as developer topics from setup through rendering and networking. Fabric is free, supports Java mods, and is described as mostly version independent. Its site says it is not an official Minecraft product and is not approved by or associated with Mojang.