Playing “minecraft” Without Minecraft (2024)
Posted4 months agoActive3 months ago
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The article discusses re-implementations of Minecraft, allowing players to run the game without the original, and the community discusses the technical details and alternatives like Minetest.
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Sep 18, 2025 at 10:13 PM EDT
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I do think that I have yet to see a bedrock player on windows as compared to java player on windows & I have been playing minecraft for so long and joined so many discord communities of minecraft related as well and that's my experience.
Java is really peak minecraft, with modpacks as well. You should try out prismlauncher, its open source and works quite smoothly on linux and you can try a lot of modpacks which the bedrock players can't play.
Fabuously Optimized is a must have modpack given how efficient it can make minecraft / give fps boosts
Yes, exactly. It seems the demographic for Bedrock tends towards kids because it's supported on tablets. IME the demographic for Java is either older kids or adults or people with interest in modpacks, which is a lot of people. All the major YouTubers who have run worlds for challenges for years are all on Java.
Whenever someone in my group asks to play some MC, there's no "Bedrock or Java?" question, it's just Java every time.
The only major thing Bedrock has right now that Java doesn't is the new stock shaders, but I assume that is coming to Java soon.
RealismCraft 2.0 would like to have a word with you. And it's paid.
https://youtu.be/s3IiifuzjgU
Of course the course of Microsoft and jeb_ might be different and he might get pushed towards some decisions later. The problem is that kids nowadays don't use computers. They use phones and tablets. For me Minecraft experience on phone is awful but there are many young generations that consider it native way of playing games
Although I see now that the project is archived, not sure the story behind that.
[1]: https://github.com/AngelAuraMC/Amethyst-Android/
Part of it was the almost year between 1.7.x and 1.8, so some major mods like Thaumcraft never made the jump.
Gregtech New Horizons (GTNH) has been back porting mods and features to 1.7.10 (like the ability to run on Java 20+) because that’s easier than porting the whole mod pack forward.
I have not played minecraft in a few years but I think nothing has changed. Mojang, even pre microsoft, has never provided any sort of modding support. I grew up on quake where ID would give you the game code and tools necessary to make mods. Mojang gave nothing. modding on minecraft involved decompiling the bytecode, dealing with the terrible symbols the decompiler gave you then recompiling it back into a jar. It was ugly and unpleasant. later the bigger efforts produced some tooling and libraries to make this better, but mojang had no part in this.
So minecraft is wierd, one of the most modded game in existence, yet the developers have provided no mod support.
new Block("mymod:mystone").setShape(Shapes.CUBE).setTexture("mymod:stone_texture").setStepSound(Sounds.STEP_ON_STONE)...
you now have to do some of this inline (the part that can't be customized in data packs):
new Block("mymod:mystone").setStepSound(Sounds.STEP_ON_STONE)...
but the rest is looked up across 5 different cross-referenced JSON files full of magic values with no autocomplete or syntax highlighting. Start with an indirection layer in assets/mymod/blockstates/mystone.json: [2]
{"variants": {"": {"model": "mystone"}}}
then of course you have to actually specify how to display the block: [3]
{"parent": "minecraft:block/cube_all", "textures": {"all": "fabric-docs-reference:block/steel_block"}}
(you see that? there are inheritance and variables in Minecraft's ad-hoc JSON language)
You need a second file to specify how to display the item when it's held in your hand. Usually it's similar boilerplate. But have a look at the abomination that is "item property overrides" [4] [5] as an example of inner-platforming. Instead of render(is_cast ? cast_model : uncast_model); there's this whole infrastructure of a registry of item property predicates written in Java which can then be referenced in JSON to select a different model file under specific conditions.
[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_inner-platform_effect
[2] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/1.12.x/models/blockstates...
[3] https://docs.fabricmc.net/develop/data-generation/block-mode...
[4] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/1.12.x/models/overrides/
[5] https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Models#Example:_...
Yes, having to declare json files for your new block in your mod is a pain...
Meanwhile what it was built for, resource packs, this actually gives a good amount of power to the pack maker without having to ask the client to run untrusted java code.
You can still override it in Java code instead of tweaking values, but it's much more painful because all the existing code is geared towards reading the tweakable values.
[1] https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2012/05/configuration-comple...
not even separate textures are necessary, you could very well use atlases and just stitch them together at runtime with rectpacking and just remap the input texcoords to the new, bigger atlas... boom, mod support with atlases without creating 400 2KB .png's in the game folder.
similarly, blocks can be done in code, and modders can either use that, and optionally you can expose the same API in LUA or whatever if you need a less involved / sandboxed version of mods which can be downloaded from a server or whatever.
Here's an example of shit being done from code, it's fairly terse and you don't need to trawl through 7 files to do anything: (yes I know it doesn't have i18n yet but that won't make it much more complex either)
These are fluent/chainable so I could have put all of them on one line but that's less readable IMO, but your choice really.For data files (textures, sounds and other assets) you could use a virtual filesystem like Quake did (PhysFS is a good library which vaguely approximates that) and get rid of the stupid amount of folder nesting specifying behaviour, you can just have toplevel folders and use modloader order to disambiguate.
tl;dr: almost anything can be made to work with the most convenient/most sensible method of making stuff instead of using a bunch of awkward and convoluted JSON files you aren't even using! (MC internally generates the JSONs from code, so the data lives through a code -> JSON -> code roundtrip, they aren't even dogfooding their own format lol)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6eNqSCTTKQ
Bedrock added support for modding in 2016, 9 years ago, with resource packs and behavior packs. You can make custom entities, custom items, custom blocks, etc. There is also a marketplace available to distribute these to players, built right into the game.
Java edition also has had similar things for many years.
Take the pack I'm re-playing at the moment, Compact Claustrophobia.
Even the opening moments of that pack are nothing related to the Minecraft game you can buy. Scraping materials from the bare walls? Not a thing in Minecraft, but the mod adds that because otherwise how are we going to make even a block of dirt. Oh right yeah, no dirt, we start inside an unbreakable [as far as we know] object and we have to burrow deeper and deeper into recursively defined Compact Machines, none of which exists in the Minecraft game. Your character in Compact Claustrophobia needs their own faeces to survive - if you've read "The Martian" you know how that goes. Base Minecraft of course does not have poop, so they add that.
To make all this happen requires a lot of reverse engineering. Are Microsoft doing everything they can to stop it? Not at all. But they're also not some benevolent entity adding hooks left and right for the modifications.
Did you read my post? I'm saying that Bedrock has mod support built in with public documentation. There are a bunch of hooks. You can add new blocks. You can make things happen when clicking in them. You can add brand new items.
With the approach they're taking in Bedrock maybe the Compact Machines I was first playing with years ago become possible (if somebody puts in a lot of labour) in ten years, or in twenty - if sanctioned. But they've existed for years in Java, so why bother?
Are all of the servers/mods still written in Java and it was just the desktop client that was rewritten in c++? Or is there a division between Java mods and c++ mods?
the main modding community is around java edition
It will always be more limited that Java modding but is catching up in large areas of functionality.
Amazing seeing what people are making in Bedrock running on old Android phones, Switch, and company.
I believe Mojang now provides deobfuscation mappings[0] which makes life slightly easier for modders.
[0] Although all I can find are people saying "we should move to Mojang's mappings!" rather than an official Mojang announcement.
Umm no ?
They provide deobfuscation mappings, they keep features in the code that are not exposed to players while specifically mentioning modders (new dialog system, game tests API).
You also have a couple of Minecraft developers hanging out in modloaders discord servers.
While it's true that they really started embracing modding in like 2019 (when they started releasing deobfuscation mappings), they were never hostile to modding
It wasn't easy and majong did not help back then.
Of course, they are fine with you making youtube videos about their game (itdraws people in) but try making a video about a bit darker topics related to the game and you can quickly find your video striked.
I even found an instance of a project like this one (a unfinished open-source MC clone which is vaguely similar but original assets and code and everything) receiving an LLM-written copyright claim based on "it looks similar and that's protected by our IP"
Moreover, the "finitude" of the world can be mitigated by the fact that Luanti also offers 64 km total vertically out-of-the-box; various mods use this space to create the equivalent of "dimensions". In practice, without tools that allow to dig ridiculously fast, supposedly realistic mountains (what can be realistic in a game where you can carry with you several trees, casually jump 1 m anyway and barely get a scratch from a 15 m fall?), planes, dragons or whatnot, a "troposphere" of 1 km is plenty, and would allow 128 64x64 km "dimensions".
That being said, and my own biases put aside, people outside of the Luanti core team are working on that [1]
[1] https://forum.luanti.org/viewtopic.php?t=9183
Among the various games that took inspiration from Minecraft (Voxelibre, Mineclonia, Repixture), some are more reliable than others. Those that don't try to be too close are the more reliable because replicating complexity tends to lead to more bugs.
https://codeberg.org/mineclonia/mineclonia/pulls/3419 - Minecraft world gen (full reimplementation)
https://codeberg.org/mineclonia/mineclonia/pulls/3351 - raids
https://codeberg.org/mineclonia/mineclonia/pulls/2681 - much improved mob spawning
https://codeberg.org/mineclonia/mineclonia/pulls/2184 - a big mob rewrite
https://codeberg.org/mineclonia/mineclonia/pulls/2516 - client-side modding support, there's https://codeberg.org/halon/mcl_localplayer/ which makes physics and some other things way more Minecraft-like (elytras, proper eating, horses, etc), although currently it requires a Luanti fork since the upstream is not very interested in the changes.
"In order to run all of these, you will need a 64 bit computer (ideally little endian, on BE you will need to use a JIT like box64 which decreases performance) with 4 or more processor cores at over 900 MHz. A minimum of 4 GB of RAM is recommended, with some trickery like zram you might get away with less but it will cause slowdown. Ideally youd want an OpenGL capable graphics card too."
Alongside text like:
"Now, click on the right facing triangle (play button"
It reminds me of my “electronics” class back in school (2010): Day 1 was learning how to use a computer mouse. Day 2 was straight into how a CPU works on an electrical level.
That’s awesome though, re: serving the site from a camera. Are there details on that somewhere?
Edit: Nvm, found it here: https://lenowo.org/viewtopic.php?t=2
Edit 2: I also like this thread, in which they are considering moving the site to a Galaxy S5, but decide not to after seeing that the site survives the HN hug: https://lenowo.org/viewtopic.php?t=28
- samsung galaxy s5
- router
- mips switch
- disposable vape
But both your points are valid, doors are implemented like shit in < 1.13, but I added support https://gitlab.bixilon.de/bixilon/minosoft/-/commit/9afbe0df... (Oct 14, 2023). I will test that...when I got time :)
No clue about mobs, but textures were named differently back then. Could be.
So is it based on the original or is it a reimplementation? It's based on CraftBukkit about which their site says:
> CraftBukkit is a modified version of the Vanilla Minecraft Server which allows it to run Bukkit plugins. The main goal of this project is to produce a server as close to Vanilla as possible,
So it's based on the original code? But it's also said to be open source. I'm confused.
Being able to play without a Microsoft account does appeal to me; the forced migration from Mojang accounts to Microsoft's shitty account system still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Also, my son can't play with his friends because they all have Bedrock while we of course have Java.
I don‘t know for sure, but the source code could be based on a decompilation of the official server classes. Apparently decomp projects are open-sourceable - see all the N64 projects that would otherwise have been shut down by Nintendo.
The code patches are open source, alongside some new classes (that are mainly interfaces, and the patches add the implementations basically, and also hooks into their event system)
Spigot themselves don't provide a link to a built .jar, their provide a link to a java tool that
- downloads the official Minecraft server - decompiles it into .java files - Applies the source code patches that are open source in spigot - Adds the spigot api files that are 100% open source - compiles all of this back to a .jar
I used it a couple of years ago and it worked fine.
> So it's based on the original code? But it's also said to be open source. I'm confused.
The contents of the open source repository are a set of patches to apply to the decompiled code, plus some fully new classes to add an event system, or interfaces (where patches hook into the event system and provide the implementations of the interfaces)
Also most people use Paper (which is a Spigot fork that recently diverged and became a hard fork)
In case anyone was wondering what this refers to, it is known as "The Flattening":
https://minecraft.wiki/w/The_Flattening