For anyone asking for 1.17 forge here is the rundown of the process that goes into updating it.
[!WARNING] Forge for this version is no longer supported. If you are a mod developer please try to update your mods to 1.18 as soon as possible.
This version only recieved a recommended build before dropping the support. This was due to the large number of changes that happend in MC code and in Forge’s code.
The Big Peel
This refers to a quite large rewiting of how the mods are loaded internally. This doesn’t change the “just place the mods inside the mods folder”. And it should not effect players. For the more technical people this means that mods are not Java modules and the mod loader uses modules for loading mods.
Progress
- step 0: have vanilla decompiling and compiling again without forge on top. This is needed because the decompiling is not perfect.
- step 1: have forge compiling, this means that all the code modifications that forge adds still produce a compiling code. This process often requires disabling patches/features temporarily
- step 2: [Mostly done] once forge compiles and the initial set of patches can be produced, then forge can start to be properly developed, until it’s in an usable state enough to actually use. In this phase we make sure that none of the forge extra code parts break the original functionality.
- step 3: fix all the missing features (that make sense to fix), cleanup, add new hooks, etc. This is the longest part as people have to figure out what mojang did and how to expose it to the modders in a safe way– this will take some weeks, and result in the recommended build
Most of this takes a long time and people are doing it in their free time so be patient and don’t ask them. If everything goesright the first forge version will hopefully not take longer than a few weeks. But this doesn’t mean that mods will be updated as well. Mods (just as forge) are made by people in their free time for free, and real life should and always will be the priority.