1) What is Warcraft Reforged? Does it have separate tools? (I guess so)
Warcraft III was patched over in 2020 with a new version of the game, which is considered by corporate leadership (Blizzard/Activision/Microsoft) to be the only official version of Warcraft III. This version's menu screen calls itself "Reforged" (or at least it was calling itself Reforged from 2020 until 2024 when I used it; there were some recent changes to have the new program show the menu background art file of the older program, which could potentially make this more confusing).
Players who owned "The Frozen Throne (2003)" and did not own Reforged, if they were playing online constantly since 2003, have had their game automatically updated to the Reforged version, but then for them the Reforged graphics mode toggle is blocked so that they can only use the non-Reforged graphics files until they pay for the Reforged models.
Starting on November 21, 2025 (about one week ago) it is now the case that players who owned "The Frozen Throne (2003)" game from a CD key are now no longer able to redeem those CD keys for a free copy of the Reforged game. This means that in the present day, the only officially sanctioned way to purchased and play Warcraft III if you do not already have it on your Battle.net account is to purchased the Reforged and then disable the "Reforged graphics" toggle slider.
2) If I don't want to map for Reforged, which Warcraft version should I target?
This question will receive opinionated answers depending on the person answering, and at what point in the ongoing evolution of the game software that individual person felt the changes were "too much" and they wanted to break away. Any answer I could give you would be biased and opinionated in the same way.
The best I can provide you is probably some history:
1.14-1.22:
- These patches were made by Blizzard Entertainment and/or Vivendi's Blizzard, and are a complete and functional version of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne as it was
then
1.23-1.26:
- These patches were made by Activision shortly following the takeover of Blizzard Entertainment. At this time, they still had the original Blizzard Entertainment people and the primary reason for the patches was to fix a virus vulnerability in the game where any map can take over your computer with a virus and bypass all virus protection by pretending to be the Warcraft III game. So all versions prior to this are vulnerable to the virus exploits. Doesn't mean you can't use them, just means you want to be careful what custom maps you play
- The attempted fix for the virus maps didn't work so the point of these patches is mostly moot. It added a
hashtable API for custom maps to try to intentionally support a "feature" (really a useful bug in map making) that was lost while fighting the viruses
1.27-1.28:
- These patches were made by the Reforged team but they did not announce Reforged yet so you can't tell they're Reforged, everyone online would say they are classic/legacy patches,
but they failed to fix the virus vulnerability again
1.29:
- This patch changed the game to support 16:9 resolution, 24 player maps instead of 12, and added other API changes to maps. I am no longer able to "typecast" in jass on this patch which as far as I know means it would be allegedly safe from the virus maps.
1.30:
- This patch changed the game storage format to the newer Battlenet format system, so by this time most modding tools that existed had to be redone to load game art (for example Magos War3ModelEditor)
1.31:
- This patch added "lua" scripting language support. The patch notes literally say 'this is the last patch before the Reforged' as the name is public now
1.32:
- This patch changed the size of the game download from 1-2 GB on disk to 30 GB on disk, even if you don't pay for Reforged and can't use the new assets. The menu screen was replaced with an embedded Chromium browser-for-game-engine system that lags worse than the game itself on some computers, and the menu says "Reforged" with a big new logo for everyone, so everyone believes this is the Reforged patch and a lot of people who rebel and do old stuff cutoff at this point and don't play versions after this
2.0:
- This patch was made to sell AI up-scaled Warcraft RTS battlechests at Microsoft. A new person believed they could "Fix" Reforged by adding a third graphics mode with AI upscaled versions of the art, instead of the hand drawn Reforged art, as if the program with this game were the art Blizzard bought from a Malaysian studio for the Reforged game rather than the bad corporate management and bad technology decisions made by Activision Blizzard (which in my opinion are the more likely culprit of problems). The third graphics mode, unlike Classic and Reforged graphics mode, has no option for a map to opt-in. Instead, players have to enable it ingame prior to playing the map, which means they will probably forget to enable it. Also, maps made for Reforged graphics can't require that it be turned off. This means that most maps made with Reforged graphics become comical spaghetti switching between AI upscale and new graphics, except for when manipulated by technically skilled users.
3) Which are the most modern editor for this version? I have NewGen WE and JNGP from ca. 2009 installed and been working with this so far.
JNGP required a hack to keep it working on 1.28, and altogether would have stopped working on 1.29 as I recall.
From 1.29 until 1.30, there was a new tool kind of similar to JNGP that was called WEX. Several people were using WEX, but then the guy working on it got hired by Activision to do stuff with Reforged. I'm not actually sure what he did, but WEX died. While he was working there, he convinced them to embed the JassHelper tool that JNGP and WEX were using into the Reforged game itself, so if you make a map on the 1.31 map editor (or newer) it has JNGP built in and will support the community extension vJASS syntax.
However, in one of the newer Reforged patches after Microsoft bought the game and started steamrolling over the work of the 2020 Activision/Blizzard folks in patches, at some point the default settings broke so that the JassHelper is turned off by default and you have to enable it in a dropdown menu, and they made it that Reforged editor crashes randomly for folks and then they lose their work maybe (this might have been fixed, I'm not sure). My general feeling in the last 2 years has been that from patch 1.33 onwards, this company's primary focus is to serve Grubby and the esports scene and trying to keep custom maps and World Editor working is mostly an afterthought. (Maybe even more so than for the 2020 version of Reforged and all the pains and internet complaints it spawned)
4) How do people do JASS scripting nowadays? I have worked with JassCraft back in the day and I read that there is also the option of C# now
Last time I was doing jass programming, I think I used a vim plugin from here on Hive Workshop and I wrote my jass in a plain text file on a Linux computer, because I personally am trying not to use Microsoft Windows. That is my bias. What I am using isn't better than Notepad++ and JassCraft that you have.
4. You can use lua now or a lot of other options that either transpile into lua or jass (typescript, c# or wurst for instance).
This is, of course, only true if you use patch 1.31 or newer.
I have no idea which tools I should use now.
To be honest, I'm so hurt by my biases and the bad management that I do ridiculous things now. I tried to rewrite a facsimile of the Warcraft III game that runs on LibGDX engine. It has a ton of unfinished stuff and worse bugs than Reforged, but I find it charming, because every time I fix one of those bugs, I learn how to fix it and I eliminate the problem instead of depending on someone else to fix my bugs for me who doesn't care about me and most likely never will. This has, of course, made me a crazy person and borderline troll on this forum, so maybe that's all I'll say about that.
