Architectury Loom vs MCreator

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.

MCreator is free, open-source software for making Minecraft Java mods, Bedrock add-ons, resource packs and data packs. A visual interface lets users create many mod elements without programming knowledge, while the integrated code editor provides syntax highlighting, autocomplete, formatting and breakpoint support. Asset tools include texture and animation editors, a mob animation wizard and a sound manager. Built-in testing and a Java debugger support Minecraft client and server work. MCreator Link connects Arduino and Raspberry Pi hardware with Minecraft through procedures, commands and an API. Community plugins can add generator types, procedure blocks, AI tasks and API support, although the maker warns that especially Java plugins can be powerful and should not come from unknown sources. The application runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and internet access is needed during setup to download dependencies. Its desktop app collects anonymous usage data, with analytics disablement available in modern versions. Support includes a knowledge base, wiki, forum and issue tracker. The listed plan costs nothing, with voluntary donations.