I'd like to start off with a commendation to my good friend @nolij for the many contributions he provided to the project, most of which were behind the scenes. His support has been invaluable and I look forward to working with him again if he wishes to take on the maintainer role in the future.

That said, it's important to recognize that Embeddium is now worked on by a single developer (myself). Additionally, my time to work on the mod will be reduced due to some obligations outside of Minecraft. Therefore, some changes need to be made to ensure that I don't burn out, and that the project can be maintained at the same standard players & modders currently expect.

This announcement discusses the changes that impact players. Changes that impact modders will be discussed in a future announcement, as they will only come into effect for 21.0, and won't impact Embeddium for older Minecraft versions.

## Summary

* Embeddium development will focus on Forge 20.1 and NeoForge 21.0+.
* Embeddium will support Forgified Fabric API natively in the next release.
* Fabric support for 21.0 and newer is currently suspended due to lack of time.
* Fabric support for 20.1 will continue for the time being, since many mods are still developed for this version.
* Forge versions of Embeddium for 19.2 and older are no longer actively supported.
* All of the above are subject to change with community help.

## End of support for legacy versions (19.2-)

These versions are slowly but surely declining in activity, and they're based on an older version of Sodium that has significant differences from the one used in 20.1 and newer. Backporting the modern codebase is possible (particularly to 19.2) but it would not be very useful for the community as many mods hook into and expect the old internals to be present. For that reason, 0.3.18 will be the last release for these versions, with the exception of a community-contributed bugfix or partial feature backport. Of course, Embeddium is still completely functional on these versions, and the 0.3.18 release appears quite stable.

## The future of the Fabric port

This is the most impactful change.

It's not realistic for me as a solo developer, with my current responsibilities, to maintain Embeddium for two modloaders single-handedly. For that reason, the current plan is to **suspend development of the Fabric port for newer Minecraft versions, but maintain the 20.1 port for some time**. This is not a decision I've taken lightly, as I recognize many quality-of-life mods are exclusive to Fabric. Before you riot, please continue reading. :wink:

For the last little while, I've worked on ensuring that the (Neo)Forge version of Embeddium will have as many of the advantages of the Fabric port built-in as possible.

* Support for Fabric API has been merged into the Forge branch, using custom tooling, in a way that it *just works* if Fabric API is detected at runtime. A net benefit of this change is that **Sinytra Connector/Forgified Fabric API are now supported out of the box**. These changes will ship with Embeddium 0.3.20. There is of course absolutely no requirement to use Connector; Embeddium still works just fine on its own, and doesn't use the Fabric integration for anything except interacting with Fabric content.
* I am able to update to snapshots behind-the-scenes, although unfortunately the resulting builds are not usable by players. This allows for the actual **update to the next Minecraft version to be fast**, as all the work can be done ahead of time. If NeoForge ever does start releasing snapshot builds to players, the system is designed to be easily adaptable to that.

This situation is of course not ideal, and I would rather provide the option to use Embeddium on Fabric directly. There are some use cases for which Fabric is still the only realistic option (playing on snapshots, or building technical redstone contraptions), and unfortunately Embeddium will no longer be able to serve those niches for the time being. However, the NeoForge platform is lightweight enough that it should be able to meet the needs of most other vanilla+ players.

This is **not a permanent decision** and the Fabric port will be revived on newer versions if & when there are more developer hours to put towards the task. Until then, it will not be updated beyond 20.6, and that version will be dropped when 21 releases.

## What to expect in the new few months

In general, development will continue as previously planned. Following the release of Minecraft 21.0, the following versions will continue to receive active development:

* 20.1, on Forge & Fabric
* 21.0, on NeoForge

20.1 will remain the primary focus for several more months, until modding on 21 gains traction. I plan to support the Forge 20.1 version until the release of 22, if possible. The timeframe for Fabric 20.1 support isn't decided yet - in general the Fabric community moves to newer versions faster than Forge, so it may not make sense to support for as long.

The primary focus for the time being will be on improvements to mod compatibility, code cleanup, etc. Further performance improvements will be added conditional on having time to work on them. I would not expect anything major for quite a few months though, as I also want to revisit ModernFix.

## How you can help

If you are a relatively experienced modder interested in helping out, please feel welcome to get in touch with me, either through DMs or by sending a message in #embeddium-discussion.

If you not a modder, but you'd still like to help out in some way, there are several ways in which to do that even if you know nothing about coding. In (slightly) increasing order of difficulty:

* Get the `embeddium-testers` role and participate in testing beta builds when pinged. This is extremely helpful to me as it offloads the work of validating that there are no new incompatibilities/crashes introduced before a release. It therefore enables releases to be done faster.
* Help provide support in #embeddium-discussion for simple issues. (A number of people already do this, thank you!)

Congratulations on making it to the end. :) Thanks for your support of Embeddium thus far, and I look forward to continuing on in 21.