I have been coding mods since about February 2025 (ignoring the past year or so of mcreator mods), and from day 1 I have been using a modloader called Fabric to make said mods. If you didn't know Fabric uses a mapping called Yarn (this was fabric's official mappings). But since Mojang have unobfuscated their source code, their mappings (aka mojang mappings) have become more commonly used. Fabric decided that it was going to stop using Yarn for Mojang mappings for 26.1+ which ment I could either wait till I am on that version or learn the mappings for 1.21.1 but at the time there was little to no documentation. Although I didn't have to wait long for the fabric wiki to update its 1.21+ documentation to use mojang mappings. I have decided that I will now exclusivly use mojang mappings to make my mods meaning I wont have to re-rewrite my mods if I want to port to 26.1+ in the future, also learning these mappings mean I will be able to do stuff for AIT and other amble mods that use them!
Before making stuff like AITExtras, I used to use a modding software called MCreator that focused on making Minecraft modding "easy". This was made for Forge, so I was forced to use it. I had already used Forge for a couple of years, but I was getting bored of what it provided. I discovered other mod loaders (Fabric and Quilt) which were newer and had better performance, but seemed to lack popular mods. I found a plugin for MCreator that allowed Fabric porting, so I decided to move over. The plugin was good for a while but eventually limited the softwares functionality. I decided to learn Java (around the time Amble Labs invited me to their team).
I have been using 1.20.1 since day 1 of making Minecraft mods. It's the version I am comfortable coding in. But i think now is the perfect time to move, mainly because of AIT (a mod that I work on and make an addon for) is moving too. 1.21+ also introduces new blocks, mobs, items, and advanced features like datapackable features, item components, and vibrant visuals. Which I am very excited to work with. It will just be 1.21.1 for now as a I have to re-learn some code stuff and I also wanna try and stay in sync with AIT and popular mods like create.
No, I will never make something for forge ever again. Why? it's just old, and unoptimized as hell. (what about porting a mod to forge and fabric?) Nope, same answer. Also I do not have the time to maintain 2 versions of a mod. I have how ever been considering looking into learining NeoForge as I know that people prefer it over fabric but I'm not gonna promise that I will learn it!
This is a decistion I made based on the fact that I don't want people to do stuff to my mods that I don't like. For example porting it to another loader, bedrock or straight up ripping the assets. I Will still allow people to PR my projects as i can review these and accept or deny the changes! ARR also means people can't steal the mods an reupload them to another site and make money from it (I already make little to nothing from this, I don't want to loose more).
There are a couple reasons for this; the first being that it is the default language for Minecraft (at least in the us/uk), the second is that I dont speak any other languages other than english and I don't want to rely on google translate / other translations sites for my mods as I know it's they arent always 100% correct. If you would like your native language(s) in my mods, you can make a PR (pull request) that adds said translations and I will gladly add them!