What the NeoForge split changed for modded servers

On 12 July 2023 the Discord server known as Forgecord became NeoForged, and almost the whole Forge team joined it. Its long-time lead, LexManos, stayed with Forge. For anyone running a modded server the split put one question ahead of the rest: which loader. On 1.20.1 the answer barely matters. From 1.20.2 onward it decides which mods, and which hybrid server software, a server can run.

At first it was a rename

The announcement said NeoForged would stay compatible with existing Forge for the time being and was not yet a hard fork. On 1.20.1 that held, and it still shows. Create, which has passed 26 million downloads on Modrinth alone, tags its 1.20.1 files for both Forge and NeoForge, so the same file runs on either.

The promise of a stable 1.20.1 did not last. Looking back on 2023, the NeoForged team apologised for not delivering it and said that, having neglected 1.20.1 since 1.20.2 came out, work on that version was better spent on Forge. The same post described 1.20.1 as "the de facto target for modpacks in the 1.20 lifecycle". So 1.20.1 stayed Forge's version, on the fork's own advice.

Where the wall went up

NeoForge 20.2, for Minecraft 1.20.2, arrived on 30 October 2023 with its packages renamed to net.neoforged and a version scheme that follows Minecraft's own: 20.2.x for 1.20.2, 21.1.x for 1.21.1. Over the next two months its registry system, capabilities and networking were reworked. From then on each mod file targets one loader or the other, and a server cannot mix them.

The effect is easiest to see in one project. Every 1.21.1 release of Create, from 6.0.0 in March 2025 to 6.0.10 in April 2026, is NeoForge only. A 1.21.1 server that wants Create runs NeoForge, and every other mod on it has to follow.

The pack chooses, and the server inherits it

Few owners choose a loader in the abstract. They choose a pack, or the handful of mods their players asked for, and the loader comes attached. Hosting a pack means hosting its loader, its Minecraft version and every mod the players must also install on their side (what has to be on the client and what does not).

On adoption the only figures are NeoForged's own. At the start of 2025 it counted over 4,000 mods for NeoForge on 1.21.1. A year later it reported more than 16,000 for 1.21, still its most popular version, and said that catalogue had grown faster than Forge's had on 1.20.1. Launchers moved early: by the end of 2023 CurseForge, Modrinth, Prism and FTB had all added NeoForge support.

In practice the modded community splits by version as much as by loader, with older packs on Forge and 1.20.1 and newer ones on NeoForge and 1.21.1. A host carrying both is running two stacks, each with its own crash reports and its own people to ask when something breaks.

Hybrids had to choose

Hybrid servers, which run mods and Bukkit plugins in one process, are built on a particular loader, so a split in loaders is a split in hybrids. MohistMC now marks Mohist, its Forge hybrid, as end of life. Its ownership and copyright were sold in January 2025 and updates are paused, and the group's current project is Youer, a NeoForge hybrid that implements the Paper and Purpur APIs. Arclight, another hybrid, still builds for Forge on 1.21.1, but its newest supported version, 1.21.11, is NeoForge and Fabric only.

An owner who wants plugins on a modded server makes the loader choice twice: once for the pack, and again for whichever hybrid is still maintained for that loader and version.

What the split left alone

Setting up a server works as it did. NeoForge kept the layout Forge adopted in 1.17: run the installer with --installServer, start with run.sh or run.bat, and put memory settings and other JVM flags in user_jvm_args.txt. For hosts whose panels can only launch a single jar, NeoForged released a starter server.jar in 2024 that wraps those scripts, and it starts Forge servers too.

Clients still need the pack. A NeoForge server expects NeoForge clients carrying the same mods, and those downloads are the first thing a new player meets (why modded servers are slow to join). Mods that keep working when an unmodified client connects remain rare. NeoForged ran a sponsored contest for them in summer 2025 and received 16 entries.

Forge did not stop, either. Its download page lists builds up to Minecraft 26.3, the newest dated 27 September 2026 and numbered 66.0.6 in Forge's own series. Fabric carried on outside the dispute, with trade-offs of its own on a server (how it compares with Forge under load), and a compatibility layer called Sinytra Connector now runs Fabric mods on NeoForge, which gives a crashing pack one more layer to suspect.

Picking a loader for a server in 2026

Start from the pack and do not argue with it. A 1.20.1 pack built for Forge should run on Forge, which is what NeoForged itself advised for that version. For 1.21.1 and later, expect the large technical mods to be NeoForge only, and check each mod's file list rather than its project page, because the loader badges there cover every version at once. If players expect plugins, find a hybrid that is maintained for that exact version before promising anything.

Then keep version strings straight, because support threads go wrong on them. A NeoForge version beginning 21.1 is for Minecraft 1.21.1; a Forge version beginning 66.0 is for 26.3. Minecraft moved to year-based version numbers in 2026, and NeoForged said at the start of the year that its own scheme would need adjusting to match. The parts of hosting that do not depend on the loader are in the general guide to Minecraft community servers, and a first modded test server can run on one of the setups in hosting Minecraft without paying for it.