Dozenal Mod

A Minecraft mod implementing an alternative approach to dozenal formatting.

What is Dozenal?

Dozenal is one of the popularised names for a positional number system using twelve as the base. Proponents of the dozenal system claim that it is superior to decimal because many common fractions are more neatly represented in dozenal.

For example:

• 1/3 = 0.4
• 1/4 = 0.3
• 1/5 = 0.24972497...
• 1/6 = 0.2

For this project I intend to use the Unicode ↊ for ten/dec and ↋ for eleven/el/leven, though with slightly modified glyphs to fit the artwork I use elsewhere.

History

Replacing the NumberFormatProvider implementation to provide custom NumberFormat implementations which implement dozenal formatting is a great pure solution to the problem.

However, it has its drawbacks. In order to make all number formatting go via NumberFormat factory methods, you end up having to fix:

• Minecraft itself
• Forge
• Any other mod you want to include in a pack

Maintaining changes to Minecraft itself from version to version is a burden. Patches on Minecraft break and have to be reimplemented. Code moves around from class to class and has to be tracked down again every major update.

Changes to Forge itself most likely don't get accepted by Forge devs. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried.)

And of course, any decent pack has a lot of mods, some of which deal with number formatting. Sometimes a lot of number formatting.

Design Outline

The approach taken in this mod is simple but fiddly:

• Intercept all calls to draw strings
• Find numbers in the string
• Parse the number to get numeric values out
• Reformat the numeric values in dozenal
• A built-in resource pack deals with adding any glyphs missing from Minecraft's default resources.

Each time Minecraft updates, the signature of the method rendering strings may change, which requires an update -- but only one update. The rest of the mod code remains unchanged.

Building this Mod

Prerequisites for running the build:

• JAVA_HOME is set and points to a JDK 8 installation. The build will not work on newer versions!
• Nothing else? Not to my knowledge, anyway. Gradle should set up the rest.

To build:

gradlew build

This will produce a distribution jar in build/libs which is the mod jar.