Secondary Mod Dependancies

I've been making an Alex's Caves add-on that adds new blocks, Mobs, etc... all of which revolve around a new structure that uses new blocks and blocks from Alex's Caves. I added Alex's Caves as a dependency, but Alex's Caves requires Citadel as a dependency, I don't really know how to deal with this, I tried adding it as a dependency in the same way as Alex's Caves, but the game crashed, I tried ignoring the dependency and just adding it as a mod, no dice, crashed. I need help with this, by the way I'm using a plugin to add forge 1.20.1 to 2025.1, if that helps.