Chain Links is a mod by Hindbodes (myself, obviously) that adds new crafting recipes for chainmail armour, and a new set of armour to the game. This mod only works in 1.12 and 1.14, because I got sick of the game and basically abandoned trying to update Chain Links. I was never going to be the man to step up to the challenge of updating this mod to MC 1.15 or later. However, I am updating this post to reveal this more clearly and state that I'll now be allowing the creation of forks, on certain conditions. The conditions can be seen in the bottom paragraph of this post. I hope you guys don't get a disease from reading my bad Chain Links code.
Now you're probably wondering: What? Why did you make another chainmail crafting mod? There's plenty of those!
There are also plenty of slightly-different Super Mario games. Think about it.
The purpose of Chain Links is mostly to lay down some strong forms in the chainmail world and allow a different kind of balancing to enter the game, and partly to get myself going as a mod developer. This is my first mod, but I didn't cheap out: this is a perfectly functional and reasonably useful mod that doesn't deal in major oversights or shoddy artwork. Well, that part wasn't questionable until The Flattening, at least...
What's so logical about your crafting recipes?
Behold!
Most chainmail mods do some pretty strange things with their recipe design. They craft the chainmail out of iron bars, or use iron ingots and sticks directly to craft the armour. In this mod, it's pure expensive-to-cheap conversion, using iron ingots and nuggets to craft equivalent amounts of a new material, which can be used much like Minecraft's leather. Simple, to the point, and conventional to Minecraft's crafting designs.
Chain Links also makes itself unique by adding an old teaser feature called Studded Armor into the modern game. Originally, studded armor was a mysterious addition to Minecraft Indev that didn't make it past the "sprites in game files" stage. In Chain Links, it is a feature that combines chainmail and leather to make a material around as good as iron, but also in possession of Armor Toughness. The only other armour to use that stat is diamond armour, which has twice as much toughness.
Studded Armour is also good for enchanting, being more enchantable than iron and diamond armour is.
But you already have iron, can't you just make iron armour?
A full set of iron armour cannot be crafted out of twelve ingots. A set of enough chain links to craft full chainmail armour can be. Want to spend less iron? Craft chainmail and save your other ingots for doors and tools. Also, chainmail armour looks cool and being able to craft it is cool too, don't diss.
Thanks to The Flattening, making modded worlds able to properly update from world to world is trickier than a lot of people are willing to deal with. A world made in Chain Links 1.12.2, when updated to a Chain Links 1.14.4 environment, will do some weird and annoying things. Block of Chainmail is not something that most people will have in their Chain Links 1.12 worlds as it has always been an unused feature with no crafting recipe, but if they built something using the chainmail block after hacking it in, a 1.14 environment will erase the blocks that are built out of chainmail blocks, which doesn't affect chest inventories or similar. Studded armour will also refresh its health bar, giving you an unfair but very slight advantage. Enchantments on studded armour might disappear when loaded in 1.14.4, too, I'm not sure.
I would have thought this unacceptable, and held off on releasing the 1.14.4 update for ages because of these flaws. But then none other than Jorrit Tyberghein, an expert on Minecraft modding, told me that he and plenty of other people don't bother fixing update compatibilities in their Minecraft mods. Apparently it's too complicated and difficult to really have most people bother. That info and a bit more could be found in the 1.14.4 download's readme, if it weren't true that zip files containing the mod jar and some other things weren't uploadable. Whoops. How did this get past me?
Personally, I'd rather have made the transition of Chain Links worlds from 1.12 to 1.14 work a lot better, but I've accepted that it's just not gonna happen. I am a Java noob with lots of non-Java stuff to do, and a mod people like that's been stagnant for months, in spite of many major updates past The Flattening being released.
I think one post-Flattening update is good enough for me... Here's the thing, I can't stick with the modern Minecraft game much longer, even in a modding environment where everything I want to change can potentially be changed. So Chain Links might not get another version update in the future. I'm proud of Chain Links, and acknowledge that it's been used quite a few times. I'm just too disconnected from Minecraft to want to put heaps of effort into trying to improve it at this point.
I updated the old 1.12 download's text files to fix some grammar and link errors, except, blast, the downloads can only be un-zipped jar files anyway...
All rights are reserved, except that you are allowed to put this mod in any modpack as you'd like, and that you are allowed to make forks of this mod so long as you also in some way make it clear that Chain Links by It_Ends/Hindbodes is what the fork is based on. I can't claim that I "invented" craftable chainmail, because I know I didn't, but there are other more specific aspects of this mod that are somewhat original. It'd be very nice to start seeing this modification popping up in new places and contributing to something bigger than itself, and it'd be nice to see forks of Chain Links pop up. I welcome the innovation. When putting this in modpacks, the important thing is that you don't claim credit or obfuscate the information that leads people to know that the mod came from here. This may not be a ground-breakingly original idea, but the code, recipe design, and texture sprites came from work done by Mojang, Forge, a helpful tutorial, and myself. So please do not try to assert that you own Chain Links or mislead people to the wrong source. Not that I needed to tell you that. Make sure some kind of link to this page is present in your modpack, modpack webpage, or modpack readme files. I think I got trounced in the chainmail mod popularity game by Leo, anyway.