Custom Data

Sponge has a powerful data system, that can do much more than just vanilla features. It’s also possible to create your own data objects, allowing you to serialise objects directly to players, entities and more!

To start making your own data, we recommend that you read up on each of the components of the ecosystem in the data documentation. You should understand how a fully implemented system works before you begin work on your own implementation.

There are three main areas of custom data:

  • DataHolders, which store data such as items and entities
  • DataManipulators, which are attached to a DataHolder and can contain any number of serializable objects. Manipulators will stay attached to their owner, even across reboots
  • Serialization, which saves/loads data into configs, files, or world files

We will provide and explain snippets of code throughout the tutorials, however we also provide a full implementation for those that prefer to look through an example implementation.