The Silver Fox of Modpack Dev Tools

This review covers 1.12.2 only.

It's old, it shows its age, and it was incredibly sexy back in its heyday (and some people swear up and down that it still is): this dev tool is the definition of a silver fox.

CraftTweaker is, at its core, a recipe editor. Using it requires the use of a custom scripting language designed specifically for the mod called ZenScript, the documentation for which is fairly good (provided you know how programming languages work already).

Pros:

• out of the box, the capabilities of the system are highly expandable via the use of ZenClasses and native method access. With addons, you can edit the recipes from even more mods.
• literal decades of documentation on how to use, abuse, and expand the core functionality, most of which is collated on a single webpage (the official CrT documentation)
• mountains of example scripts to crib from in modpacks like E2E:E, ROTN, and SevTech

Cons:

• requires learning an entirely new language (ZenScript), as opposed to just using Java (which minecraft developers should already know) the way GroovyScript (the main only competitor to CrT on 1.12) does
• ZenScript has technical limitations that make doing certain things unintuitive or outright impossible: this problem cannot be fixed due to the design philosophy and technical debt of ZS itself
• significant load time cost as some things can't be hotloaded after editing files (this is a technical limitation whose blame is split between minecraft itself, the zenscript interpreter, and the jvm they both live in)