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

About this:

The thing is that also from what i have seen, (and it seems logical) is that using private fields, but using getters and setters to access them is also not good as it defeats the point of using private fields in the first place.

The main problem is that many developers automatically generate getters and setters for all private fields. And if you're going to do that, I agree, you might as well keep the field public (no, public fields are even worse).

For every field that you have, you should check:

a) does it need a Getter (do other classes need to know the value of this field)
b) does it need a Setter (do other classes need to be able to change the value of this field)
c) or does the field need to be immutable (final), if so it must be initialized during definition or in the constructor (and it can obviously have no setter)

But you should hardly ever (exception: value objects) assume that all private fields will have getters and setters and let your IDE generate them all.