Developers

Detecting Connector’s presence

You can use the APIs provided by Fabric’s FabricLoader and FML’s ModList to detect Connector’s presence in your mods.

• Connector’s FML modid is connector.

• The Forgified Fabric API uses fabric_api as its main mod id. All of its modules follow upstream mod id’s where dashes (-) are replaced by underscores (_) to comply with FML’s requirements.
  (e.g. fabric-transfer-api-v1 -> fabric_transfer_api_v1)

Placeholder mods

Motivation

As a developer, you may be interested in officially supporting your mod on Forge via Connector. One possibility is publishing a “Forge” labelled release to platforms such as CurseForge and Modrinth. Under the hood, this is still a Fabric mod jar, except it has an additional dependency added on Connector.

While this is a clever way to trick the modpack manager into running Fabric mods on Forge, it doesn’t offer any way of informing the user about the Connector dependency in case it is downloaded manually. The mod file is still a Fabric jar that gets ignored by FML, leaving users potentially confused about why the “Forge” mod they installed is not loading.

Including a dummy FML mod metadata file might help resolve this issue, but at the same time, it would lead Connector to ignore the mod completely, as it does with all FML mod jars.

Integration

To overcome this issue, Connector offers a placeholder mod feature that allows developers to safely depend on Connector and notify users of missing dependencies without causing issues with duplicate mod IDs. To enable this feature, include a standard FML metadata file in your Forge release mod file with the following lines:

[properties]
"connector:placeholder"=true

This will let Connector know the mod’s FML metadata only acts as a placeholder, and it won’t consider the file a FML mod, proceeding to load it as a Fabric mod instead. You can now safely declare a dependency on Connector without having to worry about it being ignored. FML will promptly alert the user in case Connector is missing.

[[dependencies.examplemod]]
modId="connector"
mandatory=true
versionRange="*"
ordering="NONE"
side="BOTH"

modLoader="javafml"
loaderVersion="[47,)"
license="CC0-1.0"
 
[properties]
"connector:placeholder"=true
 
[[mods]]
modId="examplemod"
version="1.0.0"
displayName="Example Mod"
authors="example"
description='''Example Mod'''
 
[[dependencies.examplemod]]
modId="forge"
mandatory=true
versionRange="[47,)"
ordering="NONE"
side="BOTH"
 
[[dependencies.examplemod]]
modId="minecraft"
mandatory=true
versionRange="[1.20.1]"
ordering="NONE"
side="BOTH"
 
[[dependencies.examplemod]]
modId="connector"
mandatory=true
versionRange="*"
ordering="NONE"
side="BOTH"

Here’s how the resulting FML dependency error looks like: