AlmondCraft

This is a mod downloader (it downloads mods and libraries used by them from the Internet) and loader (it injects them in current classpath so Forge actually loads them as regular mods).

It uses Almond to download stuff.

But why?

We are tired of numerous dependency mods which must be installed manually. We want you to be able to just specify what mods you want to get and do not ever touch your mods folder after that.

But note that this only works with Maven repositories. It would not work with mods which are available only at CurseForge.

Regarding Rift

I do not plan supporting rift in AlmondCraft's first versions - my primary goal is forge. Although i will try adding rift support (if possible) as AlmondCraft does not pollute your mods folder.

For mod developers

Everything you need to do to for your mod to become available is to publish it in a maven repository. If your mod is open source and available on GitHub, JitPack could suffice.

Usually you still need to provide build artifacts for platforms like CurseForge. For such cases you should be able to provide a json manifest like shown in the almond repository which will then be used to download artifacts from maven.

Please note that if you upload to an own maven repository (or to forge maven repository if that is possible), you must modify build.gradle to allow building POM files which are used by nearly any maven client (including almond) to resolve dependencies.