Networking/1.16

Communication between servers and clients is the backbone of a successful mod implementation.

Read an overview/1.16 of why networking matters and the basic strategies in thinking about networking.

There are a variety of techniques provided by Forge to facilitate communication - mostly built on top of netty.

The simplest, for a new mod, would be SimpleImpl/1.16, where most of the complexity of the netty system is abstracted away. It uses a message and handler style system.

Overview

There are two primary goals in network communication:

1. Making sure the client view is "in sync" with the server view
   • The flower at coordinates X, Y, Z just grew
2. Giving the client a way to tell the server that something has changed about the player
   • the player pressed a key

The most common way to accomplish these goals is to pass messages between the client and the server. These messages will usually be structured, containing data in a particular arrangement, for easy sending and receiving.