Many of you will be aware of the announcement to update the mod to 1.15 over the next few months.

This is a huge undertaking for Mevans and the mod team and will be a lengthy process working and rewroking through the entire code of the mod.

I won't pretend to understand much about coding but I do know that a project of this scale will almost certaintly face some unforeseen challenges and issues that will need to be resolved, whether it be the content of the mod and conflicts with changes to vanilla or mod support changes in 1.15.

For this reason, I think it would be highly valuable to have a 1.15 specific suggestions board in which members of the community can notify the mod team of areas of interest or issues that may happen and save the mod team a lot of wasted effort due to small oversights in the abundance of things they would have to think about in updating to 1.15.

You may be wondering what sort of suggestions this may entail but here are a few examples, although a bit obvious as these are things I can think of from the top of my head. Many of which if not all I'm sure the mod team have already thought about but will help visualise what sort of things can be discussed:

1. Now that many textures have been changed in vanilla, some of the textures for LOTR will need changing so that they don't look out of place. E.G. Ores will look weird if they still use the old stone texture amidst the newly changed texture. This goes for leaves and possibly some other blocks as well.

2. Maybe the code used for the throwing of the trident can be adapted for spears and throwing axes in the LOTR mod.

3. Now that vanilla crossbows have been added will there need to be any changes to the LOTR crossbows? Will it be confusing if the vanilla and modded crossbows function differently?

4. Some recipes will have to be changed. For example anything involving ink sacs in 1.7.10 will have to be changed to black dye in 1.15.

5. How will shields function now that vanilla has a working shield. Do we make the shields craftable and usuable items and if they are do they still need the huge amount of alignment to get them?

6. Some of the new blocks in 1.15 have similar or the same function as things in LOTR, such as repairing equipment. How do we make these compatible and should we make faction specific variants of these new crafting utilities?

7. The modding support in 1.15 has changed in many ways to that of 1.7.10, with many new possibilities that would of never been possible before. I personally don't know much about what these changes entail, but you only have to look at CubicChunks and Immersive Portals to see the new possibilities. Coders could discuss what sort of things could be useful in updating to 1.15 as well as give tips in what has changed to save a lot of wasted effort. On the opposite side of the same coin there may be some new limitations as well. As a hypothetical, road generation may not be able to function in the way it used to because of changes to world generation, (although I don't see how this would actually be an issue) and people could discuss how this issue could be fixed or what may need to be done to make roads possible again in 1.15.

Many of these suggestions may be trivial or not amount to much if the mod team has already thought of them, and I am sure they don't need a step by step guide of how to update to 1.15, but many of these suggestions could help save them a lot of time and effort and reduce the amount of work by a large margin.