What are the alternatives to public fields?

Question

I am programming a game in java, and as the question title suggestions i am using public fields in my classes. (for the time being)

From what i have seen public fields a

Answer 1

It's common to use getters and setters instead of giving other objects permission to change your fields directly. That might not make any sense when you see that 99.99% of your getters and setters don't do anything except what you could have done with direct access to the fields. But what happens when you decide that when a player is damaged beyond a point, he drops half his inventory? Or you want to restrict how many backpack slots can be used by magical items? You either have to hunt down all the places in your code where you modify the fields, or, if you used getters and setters, you make the changes entirely in the class. That's the heart of object oriented programming - that you've encapsulated "knowledge" of what an object does within the object itself, not spread it out among all the objects that interact with that object.