state json:

{
	"variants": {
		"color=white": <some model here>,
		"color=orange": <some other model here>,
		...
		"color=black": <16th model here>
	}
}


Currently we have to manually make 16 different item jsons that inherit from 16 separate block jsons.

But we can do better by putting every variant inside the blockstate json, and using setCustomMRL right?


state json
{
	"forge_marker": 1
	"variants": {
		"color": {
			"white": { "model": "someModel", "textures": ... },
			...
			"black": { "model": "lastModel", "textures": ... }
		},
		"inventory_white":
		"inventory_orange":
		"inventory_magenta":
		"inventory_black":
	}
}

code:
ModelLoader.setCustomModelResourceLocation(item, 0, new ModelResourceLocation("mymod:myitem", "inventory_white"))
ModelLoader.setCustomModelResourceLocation(item, 1, new ModelResourceLocation("mymod:myitem", "inventory_orange"))
ModelLoader.setCustomModelResourceLocation(item, 2, new ModelResourceLocation("mymod:myitem", "inventory_magenta"))
...
ModelLoader.setCustomModelResourceLocation(item, 15, new ModelResourceLocation("mymod:myitem", "inventory_black"))

Except inside those inventory_<X> blocks, we can't inherit the model from the variants above (or I'm doing it wrong)...so we just end up giving another definition for the exact same model. So in reality we did no better than just copying all those 16 item jsons into this file