Distributing Lantern

At this point, you should have a fairly good understanding of what Lantern offers, as well as an understanding of the version resolution process. Now you may be wondering how to distribute Lantern alongside your data pack.

For many data packs, bundling is a recommendation. It's good practice, and makes it easier for end users. However, for Lantern, bundling is a requirement of distribution. This is because of the version resolution process--if your data pack goes through version resolution, and then Lantern is unloaded, your data pack may very likely be in an invalid state. The scoreboards suggest that Lantern or any other dependencies were initialized, but this is only because they were not cleared on reload.

To package your data pack for release, take Lantern's data folder from the master branch of the GitHub repository, merge it with your own data folder, and handle any function tag conflicts as described on the bundling page.

Configuring Dimension Tags

The dimension tags offered by Lantern are an optional feature, although they are enabled by default. To opt out of dimension tags, delete the following file when you bundle Lantern:

data/lantern.1/functions/flags/enable_dimension_tags.mcfunction

Configuring Forceloading

Although Lantern's primary purpose is to provide forceloaded utility blocks, not every data pack requires access to these. They may, however, wish to use Lantern's version resolution tags. In this case, a data pack may opt out of forceloading by deleting the following file when bundling Lantern:

data/lantern.1/functions/flags/enable_forceloading.mcfunction