Mixin VS fernflower

And one day maybe you'll need that to inject code into specific location, but it's to do advanced things: https://github.com/SpongePowered/Mixin/wiki

SpongePowered isn't a Mod, they're the group that maintain the Framework for Mixins. The next mod in the stacktrace is cpw.mods.modlauncher

That source was probably outdated. Forge didn't natively allow you to do that. You could do Java voodoo to allow a library that implemented(? Not sure if it implemented the feature or simply allowed it to be used in a specific way) Mixins, those allow you to modify the game's bytecode. Modern Forge has that library natively. Source: First paragraph of https://github.com/SpongePowered/Mixin/wiki/Mixins-on-Minecraft-Forge

These days Mojang provides obfuscation maps, so you can work with proper class and method names (though no parameter or local variable names). There's also been a lot of effort been put into the tooling. Nowadays there exists Gradle plugins that will download the game jar, decompile it and deobfuscate it using the official mappings. You develop against the deobfuscated code, then the plugin will turn the unobfuscated names back into their obfuscated versions when you compile. There's also been technology developed that lets you easily modify specific parts of a method in the game, so you can e.g. insert calls to your own functions at runtime.[1] This saves from you having to modify the game jar itself.

[1]: https://github.com/SpongePowered/Mixin

quilt (and fabric) take mojang's jar and preprocess it similarly, but the rest of the modifications to the code are done at runtime using a ridiculously powerful instrumenting classloader. the game is not decompiled at all, other than giving you something to look at in the IDE.

If you can't use the API, I suggest you to use Mixins or really asking yourself if your idea should worth the instability/effort of creating a coremod.

see spongepowered's mixin wiki

Hello! Today I'm happy to announce the release of a project that me and my friends have been working on over the course of the last year, Quiltflower! Originally intended just for use with the QuiltMC toolchain with Minecraft, Quiltflower quickly expanded to be a general purpose java decompiler aiming to create code that is as accurate and clean as possible. If the name sounds familiar it's because Quiltflower is a fork of Fernflower, the (in)famous decompiler that was developed by Stiver, maintained by Jetbrains, and became the default decompiler in Intellij IDEA. Fernflower also quickly found its way into many other tools. After many frustrations with it myself with its decompiled code structuring and quality I decided to do something about it, and here we are! Over the past year, Quiltflower has added support for features such as modern string concatenation, a code formatter, sealed classes, pattern matching, switch expressions, and try-with-resources, and more. Quiltflower also focuses on the code quality of the decompiled output, and takes readability very seriously. We'd greatly appreciate it if you'd give it a try, with our Intellij Plugin or as a standalone jar. While it has come a long way it's still a work in progress, and feedback can be reported on our issue tracker.

You can decompile the classes into .java sourcecode using Fernflower and store that to disk, then use the Attach Sources option to add it to the binary dependency you're using. This allows you to edit the source freely for your reference while continuing to use the original binary.