Minecraft's obfuscated codebase
Minecraft’s codebase isn’t open source therefore we cannot see how it really works which is fundamental for modding.
Historically, the code that runs on our computers was not the source code but was compiled and obfuscated.
In software development, obfuscation is the practice of creating source or machine code that is intentionally difficult for humans or computers to understand
Mod loaders creators had to reverse engineer the compiled and obfuscated code, a very hard and tidious task, to create mappings: a human readable code format that mod creators can use that calls Minecraft native code.
Mojang has announced that they will be removing obfuscation from Minecraft: Java Edition starting with the first snapshot of the 26.1 series. Future versions will include the original technical names of classes, methods, variables, and fields, making modding and debugging significantly easier. Obfuscation mappings will no longer be necessary for these future versions.
