Crystal Blocks

Forge mod for Minecraft 1.20.1. Adds 7 decorative block families, 6 colors each, plus a glowing variant per family. My second mod, built from scratch, no mechanics, no gimmicks, just blocks you can build with.

What's in it

Family	Look	Crafted from
Crystal	glowing diagonal vein in stone	stone + dye
Speckle	scattered mineral flecks	cobblestone + dye
Brick	offset masonry, proper mortar lines	bricks + dye
Corroded	blotchy rust patches	iron nugget + dye
Mossy	patchy organic overlay	moss block + dye
Marble	flowing curved vein	quartz block + dye
Hexplate	honeycomb plating	iron ingot + dye

Each family comes in 6 colors (cyan, red, green, purple, orange, blue). Each color has the full building set - block, slab, stairs, fence, fence gate, wall.

Each family also has one glow variant, crafted with glowstone dust instead of dye, full light level (15). Glow variant gets block + slab + stairs, no fence/gate/wall - didn't seem worth it, nobody's building a glowing fence line.

Slabs (colored and glow) waterlog properly, place one in water and it holds the water like a vanilla slab. Fences/gates/walls waterlog too but that's their vanilla base classes doing the work, not something I had to build.

Everything drops itself when broken, needs at least a stone pickaxe, own creative tab so it's not buried in vanilla's building blocks tab.

Building it

Needs Java 17 (that's what 1.20.1 forge wants - different major version is what'd actually break this, not fix it)

./gradlew build

first build takes a while, forge has to download + decompile vanilla and merge mojang's mappings onto it. all cached after that though, rebuilds are fast.

Dev notes

not stuff a user needs but keeping it here for whoever (probably me in 6 months) opens this again

• WaterloggedSlabBlock exists because vanilla's SlabBlock doesn't implement waterlogging on its own. stone slab / cobble slab etc get it because THEIR classes wire it up, SlabBlock itself just doesn't. StairBlock already handles it fine so stairs use plain vanilla StairBlock, no subclass. same deal for FenceBlock/FenceGateBlock/WallBlock - all three do it themselves, registered straight, no wrapper needed.

• don't add WATERLOGGED in a createBlockStateDefinition override on top of SlabBlock. it already adds that property itself (every slab tracks it whether or not it can hold water) so adding it twice = "duplicate property" crash before you even hit the main menu. ask me how I know

• FMLJavaModLoadingContext.get() throws a compiler warning but it's not actually deprecated til Forge 1.21.1 (checked forge's source to be sure, the @Deprecated annotation is version gated). don't "fix" it just cause the IDE's yelling - the replacement isn't confirmed working on 47.4.23 and swapping working code for an untested guess to shut up a fake warning is a bad trade

• FenceGateBlock here takes a plain Properties ctor, no WoodType arg. that's correct for 47.4.23/1.20.1 - the WoodType version is a 1.21+ thing tied to the sound events rework. if some newer guide says otherwise the guide's just ahead of this MC version

• registries loop over a FAMILIES list instead of hand registering each one so an 8th family = one line added to that list + textures/json, not a copy paste job through the java

Known gaps

• glow blocks don't have fence/gate/wall (see above, intentional not forgotten - might revisit)
• haven't compiled this against a live forge maven in every env it's touched, if it doesn't build fresh somewhere it's probably just a one line api mismatch not something structurally wrong