Having done lots of Minecraft modding a decade ago, it's wonderful to see that the community is still active enough for there to be inside jokes like these.
Given the size of the game, it's not an easy feat to build a Minecraft server in any language. Yet there are seven, in just Rust alone??
rcxdude 6 days ago [-]
The protocol minecraft uses to communicate between server and client is relatively straightforward and 'dumb' (read: tolerant of missing or contradictory data), so it's quite easy to make a server that a client will connect to and work OK with. Making something that supports all the game mechanics, especially world generation (an area Mojang/Microsoft are a lot more protective of, besides) and bug-compatibility, is a lot harder.
lupusreal 6 days ago [-]
If somebody could get a high performance mc server working that supported everything except world generation, that would be immensely useful to a lot of people. Worlds are often pregenerated and this can be done offline by an official java instance, then give to the alternative software which players actually connect to.
I suspect the hard part would be getting total parity with all the undocumented intricacies of mob spawning and AI, and block interactions. But if there are slight differences from Vanilla this isn't necessarily the end of the world for players. Popular server mods like Paper already tamper with some Minecraft "features" in an opinionated way and for the most part players don't notice.
jandrese 6 days ago [-]
Getting Redstone interactions to be bug compatible is no small task. Redstone has complex interactions with nearby blocks that are completely baffling to new players and still challenging to veterans.
Mob spawning and behavior shouldn't be that difficult, but if you want identical terrain generation you are going to be cursing life.
What would really make a third party server stand out is first class mod support.
Better performance is almost a given. Minecraft's engine has a lot of low hanging fruit that has yet to be picked despite it being theoretically a multi-billion dollar game. Just look at how shockingly CPU hungry hoppers are for example. Mob pathfinding also consumes an inordinate amount of resources and is still kinda lousy.
tonetegeatinst 6 days ago [-]
Agree with how recourse hungry Minecraft is.
I get it has lots of computing to do for something like a server with large players, but even a server with a small amount of players that's technical focused can easily bring the game to a crawl.
Its funny how the best way to get great performance from Minecraft is getting a CPU with great single core performance, get lots of memory, and then use fabric mods to optimize the game/server.
faceplanted 6 days ago [-]
It makes sense that a very popular language would be being used to make one of the most popular projects.
SquareWheel 7 days ago [-]
The performance differences look pretty impressive from the benchmarks. I do notice that world generation and saving features are missing though, and these tend to be pretty expensive operations. Chunk gen especially can bring a weaker VPS to its knees. I'm sure the benchmarks were taken at an idle state, but I'd be curious to see how it compares once those features are included and being used.
I don't see it listed, but is there support for block breaking/placing yet? Presumably this would require light recalculation and a chunk update on the server.
Finally, do you plan to add advanced features like scoreboard, teams, or command block parsing in general? Mojang has at least open-sourced Brigadier for that.
Cool project. Hope to see it mature to the point of making servers easier to run on low-end hardware.
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
Hey. Im impressed with the benchmarks myself tbh.
Yep block placing and breaking is already supported, but light currently don't so everything is dark :/, We are working on it.
Yep, We want to add all cool features like scoreboards, teams and we already have a API which is similar to use to Brigadier for our Commands.
Thanks, I would love to give players on low-end hardware the possibility to host servers. I think i may test Pumpkin on a raspberry PI or something one day
SquareWheel 7 days ago [-]
I remember Notch talking about the lighting calculations being one of the hardest parts to program, so I can understand that being a challenge.
Mojang made large improvements to the lighting engine in 1.20, bringing it in line with the performance mods Phosphor[1] and Starlight[2]. Despite being deprecated now, they might still offer some useful insight into how to approach such a system in a performant way. You'll need to be mindful of the licenses, but it's likely easier than reverse-engineering Minecraft (even with mappings).
Will definitely take a look at this, Thank you. Im btw studied the Minecraft code already so i often use the decompiled code as reference.
kaylynb 7 days ago [-]
Chunk gen makes sense to implement last or never. If you want a performant Minecraft server you need to pregen all the chunks anyway. You can still later regen chunks that have never been visited to get new chunkgen on updates since chunks store the inhabited time.
I think Minecraft server re-implementations are pretty neat and I like to see when a new one comes out. There are also specific purpose server impls like MCHPRS for doing fast redstone compilation for technical minecraft.
Katzenmann 6 days ago [-]
I think a high performance block-for-block compatible chunk generation program would be great for anarchy Minecraft servers or generally servers with an "infinite" minecraft world where pre-generating all chunks is not possible.
kaylynb 5 days ago [-]
Oh yeah I agree. There's a lot of fun problems to solve with Minecraft servers. I didn't mean to imply that there are no reasons for good chunk gen. I'm primarily into technical survival so my personal priorities wouldn't be chunk gen.
mobeigi 7 days ago [-]
Are there any benchmarks for it? How much faster is it than a vanilla server?
I know Minecraft servers tend to get extremely resource intensive as the player count creep and people run extremely beefy servers to handle the load and still offer poor TPS.
Please, just use one measurement unit across all measurements for easier comparison (i.e. RAM in MB, time in ms).
Wow. Pumpkin's runtime is way better (faster, much less RAM used) than the Java versions. Congrats.
I wonder what the Kotlin-based Minestom is doing differently that causes it to have numbers between Pumpkin and the Java versions.
For comparison's sake, do you have build times for Pumpkin? I'll assume that's where critics may target.
tricked 6 days ago [-]
Minestom is not based on Kotlin, im guessing they went with a kotlin template instead. Minestom is a server implementation that doesn't use any Mojang code and by default doesn't do much for you but provides the utilities to add the things yourself.
therein 7 days ago [-]
> For comparison's sake, do you have build times for Pumpkin? I'll assume that's where critics may target.
How bad could it be? I cry while async-stripe crate builds.
alex_medvedev 6 days ago [-]
Just tested compile times
Compiling from Nothing
*Debug:* 10.35sec
*Release:* 38.40sec
Recompilation (pumpkin crate)
*Debug:* 1.82sec
*Release:* 28.68sec
I will put them into the benchmarks
echelon 6 days ago [-]
> I cry while async-stripe crate builds.
The build times on async-stripe are inhumane. I wish the project didn't use so much codegen.
kridsdale3 7 days ago [-]
I literally said Holy Shit out loud. This is an incredible improvement, and I'll refer to this in the future when I'm asked if we should make something new in Java.
dpedu 7 days ago [-]
Keeping in mind that this server appears to implement only a tiny subset of the features the ones it is benchmarked against do... No lighting, mob spawning, mob ai, redstone functionality, tree or plant growth, water/lava flow, etc.
Aeolun 7 days ago [-]
These wouldn’t significantly affect the first 10 chunks loaded?
misiek08 7 days ago [-]
More than a "yes, it should". While loading chunks you need to take redstone, nature and mobs into account. If you don’t - you need to find them and resolve at runtime with even bigger costs, relying solely on difference between programming languages in performance.
mouse_ 7 days ago [-]
Yes but also consider the extensibility accessibility Java gave us. EVERYONE was building Minecraft mods back in the beta days. I might go as far as to say that extensibility is what made Minecraft so great.
somat 7 days ago [-]
What I always found surprising was how many minecraft mods there were despite mojang having absolutely no mod support for the game.
After learning that to make a minecraft mod the process was basically decompile minecraft fight the terrible names provided by the decompiler to make your changes then recompile it, I lost all interest.
nulltxt 7 days ago [-]
Yarn[1] has pretty much fixed this along with fabric.
No doubt about it. I don't think Minecraft would have gotten as far as fast in the public consciousness without content creators like Yogscast being able to produce so much novel content from modded Minecraft.
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
I was suprised myself thats its that bad. Well optimized binary is that what your CPU loves not a big JVM runtime
lionkor 7 days ago [-]
[flagged]
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
Hey, Sorry Im not native english speaker, I will try to fix all grammer issues now thanks :D
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
Hello. I recently developed Pumpkin, Its a efficent and fast Minecraft server completely written in Rust from the ground up, Check it out :D
gynther 7 days ago [-]
Cool! Would be interesting to understand how to multithreading works? Is it just the "easy" parts or actual operations related to the world as well?
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
Currently Pumpkin has not much multi-threading but we want to go all in. There is already a good structure for multi-threading, We want to make everything multi-threaded what benefits from it
zanderwohl 7 days ago [-]
IMO chuck generation is a great candidate for mutlithreading. Keeping it off the main thread would already be a huge improvement.
lesuorac 7 days ago [-]
> What Pumpkin will not
> Be a drop-in replacement for vanilla or other servers
It seems to me that unless it's a drop-in replacement its not a Minecraft server? Akin to how say an Uno deck isn't a drop-in replacement for a Hearts deck but still both card games but not both Uno decks.
Or is it just meaning that Pumpkin (besides the network) do things differently than vanilla and so you might not be able to open a vanilla created world using Pumpkin?
looperhacks 7 days ago [-]
The common problem with Minecraft server implementations is that they are not bug-for-bug compatible, which will lead to certain techniques (especially redstone contraptions) breaking. The technical Minecraft community depends on many implementation details which not all servers support
Scaevolus 7 days ago [-]
In addition to the hundreds of blocks and mobs that would need to be implemented properly and rarely are, the lack of mod support is a killer.
The only "complete" reimplementation of Java Minecraft that I'm aware of is Bedrock.
dmonitor 7 days ago [-]
Far from it. The versions lack a lot of parity and Bedrock is called "bugrock" by the community for a reason
Scaevolus 7 days ago [-]
I edited in scare quotes for "complete" to make that clearer, but I mean in terms of at least having matching blocks/mobs despite many differing details.
lupusreal 7 days ago [-]
A lot of the parity issues are due to Bedrock not reimplementing bugs from Java (quasi-connectivity aka "droppers are doors".)
archargelod 6 days ago [-]
There are issues other than not ported bugs. Redstone in bedrock is know to be unreliable.
For example, in Java version if you take a circuit and activate it with a button/lever - it would always behave in the same way. In bedrock same setup could have random result. And "random" is something you don't want in a large sophisticated contraption.
I'd guess it's caused by some race-conditions in bedrock implementation, but alas it wasn't fixed in 7 years.
sandworm101 7 days ago [-]
There are no bugs in Minecraft, only features that have yet to be fully documented.
Dobbs 7 days ago [-]
Minecraft has a lot of bugs or otherwise surprising behaviours that parts of the community have come to rely upon. This means that most non-vanilla minecraft servers aren't 100% drop in replacements. You have to make a decision what behaviours you want vs the performance and simplicity gains you will gain.
For example there there are tricks that allow you to delete bedrock blocks. Which then lets you either get onto the roof of the nether, or drop below the bottom of the world. Not all of these tricks will then work depending upon the specific minecraft server.
Another example is that in vanilla you can "bomb" people with experience orbs, the sheer number of orbs on the screen will grind their game to a halt since there are too many objects to track and render. Some minecraft servers work around this by grouping up experience orbs into a single bigger orb. That way you have fewer orbs on screen at once.
rft 7 days ago [-]
One bug abuse that blew my mind recently is the ability to have wireless redstone in vanilla [1]. I fell deep into that rabbit hole after a previous post on here about Bad Apple in Minecraft [2].
As someone who knew about this project from earlier (I had even joined their discord) (currently have just deleted my discord account for better state of mind)
Its really made me happy that hackernews really liked this project (140 upvotes is pretty good in my opinion)
From what I remember , there was one other server as well which also was written in rust but I am not exactly sure
Also , the last time I was at it , it was really really alpha software but it was getting developed at good rate , so I am not sure about its current state (I was there when the author had gone to take his exams IIRC)
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
Hi. Im so happy there are so many people liking the project, The Project is still pretty WIP but im really working hard on this, i finished my exmans last week and currently in holidays so commits are again back to normal :D
compootr 7 days ago [-]
Maybe it's cuberite? written in C I believe
ramenlover 7 days ago [-]
Are you sharding the main thread into regions (ie. Like paper folia) or is this just breaking of non block-entities to their own threads.
dartos 7 days ago [-]
Just waiting for Minecraft to be so reverse engineered as to be its own protocol with multiple server and client implementations that just work.
it already is, the entire protocol is reverse engineered, there are tools to automatically deobfuscate the code and there is already a full reimplementation of minecraft that also supports servers
Cyberdog 7 days ago [-]
If that's the case, how come nobody seems to be writing improved Minecraft clients?
Ever since I started playing it in the beta days I've been frustrated with how poorly Minecraft performs relative to what it's showing on the screen. (Not that that stopped me from pouring hundreds of hours into the damn thing.)
vintermann 7 days ago [-]
Well, they do? Sodium, for instance. It's a mod, not a full rewrite, rewriting the client from scratch would mean a lot of boring work like speaking with Mojang's server, but I understand Sodium basically rips out and replaces the entire graphics pipeline of the client.
xboxnolifes 7 days ago [-]
There are tons. There are mods that rewrite graphics rendering, chunk loading, multi-threading, ...
imtringued 7 days ago [-]
Yeah, it was always weird how 32x32x48 extreme reactors lagged the game whenever you looked at them, but the moment you looked away everything was fine.
INTPenis 7 days ago [-]
Does that mean there are open source clients that can connect to servers without a microsoft account?
beeboobaa3 7 days ago [-]
the client has to authenticate with a central server and present a ticket to the server it wants to connect to. otherwise clients could impersonate each other easily.
justusthane 7 days ago [-]
There are server mods that remove this requirement though.
beeboobaa3 6 days ago [-]
sure, iirc it used to even just be a setting? online-mode=false
most servers leave it enabled because preventing player impersonation is pretty important so people can't just easily grief each other. some piracy servers implemented their own auth on top.
xboxnolifes 7 days ago [-]
If the server is configured to not require server auth.
InMice 7 days ago [-]
I will give it a try, Thanks for this project. The performance of pure vanilla server jar is so bad. Thats one thing I wish mojang would improve. I know new chunk generation is multithread at least. I also wish they'd officially support some basic control for SMP servers. Something as basic as areas defined by two corner coordinates and basic permissions like place, break, interact. Just a basic config file is fine I can manage the requests/updates ot it using other tools - or a simple commandline utilities in game to ops. Something that lets me not have to always only use an excluse whitelist. I know Paper/waterfall and the others have plugsins for this but theres just something nice about staying pure vanilla. Ive been keep servers alive for a long time now.
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
Hey, Im happy you want to try it out just keep in mind its not done yet many features are missing, We want to have all the things you listed be configurable in a config file, so i think you will like it. If you have any problems may worth to take a look at https://snowiiii.github.io/Pumpkin/troubleshooting/common_is... or just ask for help on our discord, Have fun :D
Hilarious site but a little unjustified. Out of those, only Valence is a real "this already exists" argument. There's 7 total and the first 3 are dead and the latest 3 (incl pumpkin) are all 2024. And all of the 2024 ones explicitly differentiate themselves from Valence which is more of a framework that focuses on modularity. These latest 3 all look like healthy competitors that are all amicable towards each other
| | released | stars | last_update |
|----------|----------|-------|-------------|
| feather | 19aug | 2,614 | 2 years ago |
| mchprs | 20jun | 1,632 | last month |
| graphite | 22jun | 160 | 2 years ago |
| valence | 22sep | 2,731 | 3 days ago |
| hyperion | 24mar | 361 | today |
| pumpkin | 24jul | 965 | today |
| ferrumc | 24sep | 673 | today |
JadoJodo 7 days ago [-]
It's pretty funny how many of these are "Is it a Minecraft server? No. It's a framework with which you can build your own rewrite of Minecraft server."
xx_ns 7 days ago [-]
Pumpkin is already on that list.
whalesalad 7 days ago [-]
This got me thinking - is Rust really the right tool for the job? And I thought, Elixir/Erlang feels like the perfect tool. Sure enough, someone did it! Great reference material for someone learning how to do things on the beam https://github.com/thecodeboss/minecraft
whazor 7 days ago [-]
I was thinking it would be cool to have a Minecraft server built with Bevy, but that has also already been done: https://github.com/valence-rs/valence
Imustaskforhelp 7 days ago [-]
Lmao it is funny how we have daysinceX websites.
is there a list of all such websites of daysinceXofY
like dayssincelatestframeworkofnode I guess?
AbraKdabra 7 days ago [-]
omfg haha.
kgeist 7 days ago [-]
What does "modern" mean in this context?
slgeorge 7 days ago [-]
"Modern" seems to be used a loose adjective these days for "I rewrote $thing [in Rust]". Minecraft was created in 2011, and is Wikipedia says the last version of the 'classic' edition was released in 2017. So anything after 2017 is now defunct.
I don't mind people rewriting things in <insert-name-of-tech-I-like> but "modern" as a value seems pretty loose, and it's often at least arguable whether it's objectively better!
codetrotter 7 days ago [-]
“Modern” more usually means some new JavaScript thing. In JS land, they consider anything that hasn’t had a commit on main branch in over 3 days to be a dead old project in need of being replaced with something new and “modern” that is up to date with the latest trends and breaking changes from the previous 24 hours of their world.
Usually the hyperbolic superlative for Rust projects is “blazing fast”. Of course, any kind of benchmarks or comparisons with other implementations are completely optional. It is simply enough to “cargo init” and start hammering out code. You don’t even need to consider the characteristics of the algorithms you choose to use! If it’s Rust, it’s “blazing fast”.
c-hendricks 7 days ago [-]
Where's that meme of the guy painting demons then laying down on the floor in fear when you need it.
renewiltord 7 days ago [-]
Your most starred repo is inferior to a shell one-liner lol. Talk about pot calling the kettle black. Just use the system dict, shuf, grep, and head.
It’s bad form to badmouth someone’s earnest work for sure. I wouldn’t do it normally since I think it’s nice that you actually did something. But if you’re going to sit in a glass house and throw stones you should expect some back.
Fortunately, my house is an underground burrow so I can throw stones with impunity. As ugly as it is to do.
codetrotter 7 days ago [-]
> a shell one-liner lol
Dig a little deeper in the repos and you may eventually find that this is exactly what that started as :^)
> badmouth someone’s earnest work for sure
Was speaking generally. Not meant at OP. I think it’s awesome that they are making a Minecraft server in Rust.
> Talk about pot calling the kettle black
Of course! Anything else would be bad form.
> my house is an underground burrow so I can throw stones with impunity
Sneaky, sneaky ;)
renewiltord 7 days ago [-]
Haha fair play if you’re in the “we’re all clowns here” camp.
Aeolun 7 days ago [-]
How do you throw stones out of an underground burrow?
renewiltord 6 days ago [-]
With your arms, usually, but I’ve known people who use catapults.
Apocryphon 6 days ago [-]
Throwing a rock straight up through a vertical shaft? Checks out.
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
Sorry, I may should not used the term Modern, Lets say the foundation is newer and more optimized than from the Original Minecraft server. Mojang developers have strict deadlines and do not care about performance (like basicly any big Studio today). This results in bad ugly code which only purpose it is to work nothing more. Minecraft was created 2009 btw
ramenlover 7 days ago [-]
I'd argue they care about performance, but they also care about a whole slew of other things that also require prioritization to maintain the game and its cottage industry. Not a huge fan of the constant dogging on mojang everyone loves to engage in...
bangaladore 7 days ago [-]
People seem to forget that if you already know where the finish line is, the journey on getting there can be made quicker and more efficient.
This, at least in my experience, applies greatly to software and hardware.
lucb1e 7 days ago [-]
> "modern" as a value seems pretty loose, and it's often at least arguable whether it's objectively better!
> vulnerabilities decay exponentially. They have a half-life. [...] A large-scale study of vulnerability lifetimes² published in 2022 in Usenix Security confirmed this phenomenon. Researchers found that the vast majority of vulnerabilities reside in new or recently modified code
A study limitation is that they looked only at security-relevant bugs (vulnerabilities). As someone who writes code, I would tend to think that this also goes for bugs without a direct security impact, but I don't have the data to back that notion up
Aeolun 7 days ago [-]
Feels kinda obvious to me? As time goes on bug density can only go on direction, and making no changes to a codebase certainly doesn’t make it go up.
lucb1e 4 days ago [-]
For bugs, perhaps, but for vulnerabilities, new attacks and techniques are being found. Or just nobody is looking at most things most of the time and it's not really correlated with age that clearly. Imo it's good to have the data of what actually happens
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
Its written from the ground up and has a clean foundation (which is not the case in vanilla minecraft server code). We also want to use cool modern features like multi-threading or the rust language which is a modern language designed to fix mistakes from older languages
philipwhiuk 7 days ago [-]
> cool modern features like multi-threading
Java 6 had multi-threading
nijave 7 days ago [-]
The limitation isn't the Java version, it's the way the MC code was architected.
Iirc part of original Minecraft's performance limitations were high object create/destroy rate leading to lots of garbage collection. With that in mind, picking a non-GCd language isn't completely crazy.
kgeist 7 days ago [-]
It was the other way around: say, the original code as written by Notch had functions like setPosition(x,y,z) and it was okay. When Jeb got in charge, he said "it's not object-oriented enough" and rewrote everything to setPosition(position). And boom, 1GB/sec allocations...
intelVISA 7 days ago [-]
How horrifying!
philipwhiuk 7 days ago [-]
I'm just saying, there's nothing "modern" about multi-threading.
plandis 7 days ago [-]
I think they are being sarcastic because the vanilla Minecraft server is heavily single threaded.
giancarlostoro 7 days ago [-]
While Java does, the Minecraft server architecture does not.
xxs 6 days ago [-]
java 1.0 (even 0.9) did have. The 1st language with a memory model was java 5 (1.5), which was back ported to 1.4.2. 1.4(.2) already had non-blocking I/O as well.
Why pick 6, though?
philipwhiuk 2 days ago [-]
I just picked an old enough version that I knew had it and the original Minecraft could have chosen to use.
(I've never written pre Java 6 code)
Imustaskforhelp 7 days ago [-]
I read this in the most satirical way possible like as if a godly narrator said it calmly.
It was really funny. It felt like a Satire LMAO
jspaetzel 7 days ago [-]
Modern in software terms almost always just means recently written. Last couple years. It's a pretty useless adjective to describe software.
E.g. sqlite probably wouldn't be called modern, but everyone loves it so who cares.
7 days ago [-]
FrustratedMonky 7 days ago [-]
Love the idea. Especially as a learning example. Always fun to learn a language by implementing a popular game.
Am confused by these two lines. Maybe it is just difference between the 'goal' and the 'current state'.
Goal:
"Compatibility: Supports the latest Minecraft server version and adheres to vanilla game mechanics.
"
But NOT:
"Be a drop-in replacement for vanilla or other servers
"
Will it be a replacement for Vanilla or not?
hexmiles 7 days ago [-]
Compatibility: refers to the ability for client of the latest mincraft server version to be able to connect to the server (pumpkin) unmodified with all mechanics working.
Drop-in replacement: refer to the ability of a server operator to simply exchange the current installation/executable of the server (be vanilla, paper, cuberite, etc...) for pumpkin while maintaining data, configuration, scripts and mods installed.
edit: grammar
FrustratedMonky 7 days ago [-]
Tell you the truth, that doesn't help clarify to me much.
If it is compatible, then can't I 'drop it in'.
They sound like they are saying the same thing.
It is compatible so clients can connect to the server and be fully operational, and thus, I should be able to drop in this server, and use it as a server?
How can it be compatible if it doesn't maintain data, configuration, etc..
Edit:
or is this about Pumpkin files. Pumpkin will maintain it's own files, data, configuration. So it can't just use existing Minecraft data files.
So if it was a new world, Pumpkin would generate new pumpkin formatted files. But couldn't just 'drop it in' on an existing world and use the existing Minecraft data files.
Not sure of long term viability as far as effort, but if it is files, couldn't a converter from MineCraft to Pumpkin file structure, make the server 'drop in'?
Arch-TK 7 days ago [-]
Maybe some more concrete examples may help:
* nginx is not a drop in replacement for apache
But from a client perspective, both implement HTTP/1.1.
* podman is not a drop in replacement for docker
But from a client perspective connecting to a service hosted in docker, that connection can still occur over TCP.
On the other hand:
* pkgconf is a drop in replacement for pkg-config
* cronie is a drop in replacement for vixie-cron
FrustratedMonky 7 days ago [-]
"But from a client perspective, both implement HTTP/1.1."
This seems too low level example to apply for Minecraft.
Minecraft has a lot going on, back and forth. For something to be 'compatible' it would need to be so detailed an implementation of the server, that it could potentially also be a 'drop in'.
Arch-TK 7 days ago [-]
When it comes to game servers, especially for highly modified games like minecraft, there's the client facing side, including how the game behaves, and then there's the server administration side.
If I were to interpret the statement made here I would assume that not-a-drop-in while being vanilla compliant means things like:
* It won't support server side mods without you re-writing them in rust
* It won't support bukkit plugins without you re-writing them in rust
* It doesn't support the configuration file format that the java server uses
* Maybe it doesn't support the world file format (which would be server side only)
* Maybe it doesn't support the same administrative commands (which you would only see as an administrator)
etc.
So it can definitely be compatible from the client perspective while being woefully incompatible with any prior experience anyone running a minecraft server might have.
7 days ago [-]
hakanderyal 7 days ago [-]
Drop-in means replacing an existing thing with a new one without changing anything.
This is not compatible with other servers plugins/data/configurations, so just replacing the binary and expecting to continue where you left off is not possible.
hoseja 7 days ago [-]
Compatible: You start a Pumpkin server, vanilla clients can join and play.
Drop-in: You run a server for some time. You decide to switch the software by replacing the executable. Everything works as before.
bombcar 7 days ago [-]
"Drop-in" is what enterprise software calls "bug-for-bug compatible" - e.g., replacing RedHat with CentOS (RIP) should work exactly the same, even if the CentOS team found bugs - they report them upstream and do NOT fix them themselves, because code may be relying on the bugs.
This is especially true with complicated vanilla Minecraft setups and red stone machines (Java Minecraft red stone has "bugs" that "shouldn't be there" but cannot be removed now since so much depends on it).
FrustratedMonky 7 days ago [-]
Guess this gets to my other point.
By the time you are 'compatible' then you have implemented everything needed to also be a 'drop-in' but data file formats might need a conversion.
So convert from Minecraft data files to Pumpkin data files. Then it could drop in.
nickitolas 7 days ago [-]
If you need to separately convert files yourself, then it is by definition not drop in
FrustratedMonky 7 days ago [-]
Didn't really mean 'myself'. But if Pumpkin detects an existing world, and does the conversion to their own format. Then it is drop-in.
Even if they supply a tool, isn't it drop-in.
Otherwise I'd so no software in existence is really drop-in. Most of them have some update that has to happen.
p0w3n3d 7 days ago [-]
I would say that Minecraft servers by some qualities are really hard to implement (for example generate world as Java would - using Java's random number generator to generate exactly the same world in Rust) or even impossible. But other usages, like walking through existing world with 1000 of your colleagues might be worth of writing a very fast but not a "drop in replacement" server. Or a massive minigame maybe?
alex_medvedev 6 days ago [-]
Hey, There were already efforts made to rewriting the same random generators from Java, And they work. Same seed as in vanilla, Same Result as in vanilla
Xeamek 7 days ago [-]
But the world generation is already deterministic with seeds
IX-103 7 days ago [-]
It's only deterministic if you feed the seeds into the exact same pseudorandom number generator and fetch random values from it in the exact same order. If you take a single extra random value out of order, then everything ends up different.
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
Hey, With Compatibility i mean be compatible with existing Minecraft vanilla client's and also use vanilla logic.
With "Be a drop-in replacement for vanilla or other servers" i mean that if you just replace the existing server file with pumpkin, pumpkin will not load configs/plugins from vanilla/other servers
FrustratedMonky 6 days ago [-]
Hello
I see it is not a drop in when using other tools, plug ins, 3rd party things.
But what about just a plain vanilla world.
Can Pumpkin read in and use the plain vanilla files? Does it do some kind of conversion and have it's own file structure?
So if I had a simple server, it could be a drop-in.
Or does the world need to be generated new inside Pumpkin? I can't use existing worlds.
giancarlostoro 7 days ago [-]
> i mean that if you just replace the existing server file with pumpkin, pumpkin will not load configs/plugins from vanilla/other servers
Will it ever though? Is this a goal?
delduca 6 days ago [-]
When I was a game developer, the last language to be considered for use in game servers was Java.
I think the Minecraft server is in Java exclusively because Notch was only proficient in that language at the time.
Hi, Valence is a framework (similar to Minestom in Java). You have to build everything you self. Pumpkin is not a framework :D. Also Valence is bit unactive (look commits)
tomasff 7 days ago [-]
That's why I said "clean room implementation". Any reason why Pumpkin does not build on top of Valence?
Would be great to see a more cohesive ecosystem for Minecraft servers in the rust community rather than reinventing the wheel
Imustaskforhelp 7 days ago [-]
yes , I was also thinking about this .
+1
rumblefrog 7 days ago [-]
Impressive stuff, but I'll be more keen to see an high performance implementation that also supports the vast numbers of Minecraft mods. Forge servers are notoriously slow on bigger modpacks.
owlstuffing 1 days ago [-]
Yep.
Aren’t mods more or less the primary justification for building a server like this?
Although Rust may in some ways improve performance, is that a better trade for the huge reduction in potential mods?
wavemode 7 days ago [-]
How would a server not written in Java support Java mods?
rumblefrog 7 days ago [-]
It'd have to be a hybrid, with more of the expensive parts rewritten in a more well suited language.
owlstuffing 1 days ago [-]
Right, that’s my take as well. But on the whole I don’t see Java itself as being fundamentally less performant, particularly with JDK 21+. Architecture choices in either language make or break performance.
This looks like its for java while dragonfly seems to be for bedrock
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
Your right
changexd 7 days ago [-]
It always fascinates me how people can do this!! Would there be any write ups about how this was made, I'd really appreciate this.
kamlaserbeam 7 days ago [-]
Just to be clear this sever only works with the current vanilla version of Minecraft? I've been interested in playing again, but on the older Beta builds (1.7.3) prior to the full release versions. These versions aren't supported are they?
lencastre 5 days ago [-]
WOWOWOWOOWOWOWOW
saintradon 7 days ago [-]
This looks great! Can't wait to check out the code in detail.
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
I would love to hear some feedback, tried my best so code is clean :D
WhereIsTheTruth 7 days ago [-]
i wish minecraft was open source, i'd be able to fix their inefficient protocol
culi 7 days ago [-]
You should check out minetest. Being renamed to luanti
WhereIsTheTruth 7 days ago [-]
Downvoter, go check this: https://wiki.vg/Protocol, let me know if that's a good way to sync a lot of fast moving entities across a TCP network
This is why people struggle with their servers, not because the game was written in java
giancarlostoro 7 days ago [-]
Curious what protocol you would use, or how you would do it differently? Are there small enhancements to the existing protocol you would do? Genuine open question for the sake of learning.
alex_medvedev 7 days ago [-]
I would prefer the UDP Protocol over TCP like in Bedrock edition. Im pretty sure many PVP players would love this. Here is much non sense in the Minecraft protocol and things made to work not to be optimized (deadlines). At our discord we even already have a sticker :mojang_nonsense: which will be used quiet often. I also don't understand Mojang's tactic with packet changes, It sometimes looks like they care about Packets not being broken and being backwards compatible but them sometimes they change the whole Networking system (1.20)
Aeolun 7 days ago [-]
Huh, if this exists and there’s already so many servers, maybe I should build a client instead.
lucb1e 7 days ago [-]
Basically any significant Java software uses disproportionate amounts of RAM. My server can easily run a web server, database server, ftp server, memory cache, etc., times a few copies because various containers have their own web server or whatnot, all at the same time. But a single copy of Minecraft is too much, even when everything else is shut down.
That's why I struggle with the server: it's written in Java. Other game servers don't seem to have this problem. If the network protocol were all, that'd be great
(I didn't downvote any of your posts in case you now wonder if that was me)
> A Rust framework for building Minecraft: Java Edition servers.
Through there are currently 3 new rust impl. differentiating themself from Valence. So it's interesting to see how this will develop long term. Like will they be for different use case(1)? Will they merge? Will some die and developers migrate?
(1): There are actually quite a lot of different use cases, i.e. Java Edition is by now mostly about mods so providing different modding capabilities and various "common mods build-in" and similar can be a big target. But so can be wanting to run a mostly vanilla community MC server for quite a bunch of people etc.
Given the size of the game, it's not an easy feat to build a Minecraft server in any language. Yet there are seven, in just Rust alone??
I suspect the hard part would be getting total parity with all the undocumented intricacies of mob spawning and AI, and block interactions. But if there are slight differences from Vanilla this isn't necessarily the end of the world for players. Popular server mods like Paper already tamper with some Minecraft "features" in an opinionated way and for the most part players don't notice.
Mob spawning and behavior shouldn't be that difficult, but if you want identical terrain generation you are going to be cursing life.
What would really make a third party server stand out is first class mod support.
Better performance is almost a given. Minecraft's engine has a lot of low hanging fruit that has yet to be picked despite it being theoretically a multi-billion dollar game. Just look at how shockingly CPU hungry hoppers are for example. Mob pathfinding also consumes an inordinate amount of resources and is still kinda lousy.
I get it has lots of computing to do for something like a server with large players, but even a server with a small amount of players that's technical focused can easily bring the game to a crawl.
Its funny how the best way to get great performance from Minecraft is getting a CPU with great single core performance, get lots of memory, and then use fabric mods to optimize the game/server.
I don't see it listed, but is there support for block breaking/placing yet? Presumably this would require light recalculation and a chunk update on the server.
Finally, do you plan to add advanced features like scoreboard, teams, or command block parsing in general? Mojang has at least open-sourced Brigadier for that.
Cool project. Hope to see it mature to the point of making servers easier to run on low-end hardware.
Yep block placing and breaking is already supported, but light currently don't so everything is dark :/, We are working on it. Yep, We want to add all cool features like scoreboards, teams and we already have a API which is similar to use to Brigadier for our Commands.
Thanks, I would love to give players on low-end hardware the possibility to host servers. I think i may test Pumpkin on a raspberry PI or something one day
Mojang made large improvements to the lighting engine in 1.20, bringing it in line with the performance mods Phosphor[1] and Starlight[2]. Despite being deprecated now, they might still offer some useful insight into how to approach such a system in a performant way. You'll need to be mindful of the licenses, but it's likely easier than reverse-engineering Minecraft (even with mappings).
[1] https://github.com/CaffeineMC/phosphor-fabric
[2] https://github.com/PaperMC/Starlight
I think Minecraft server re-implementations are pretty neat and I like to see when a new one comes out. There are also specific purpose server impls like MCHPRS for doing fast redstone compilation for technical minecraft.
I know Minecraft servers tend to get extremely resource intensive as the player count creep and people run extremely beefy servers to handle the load and still offer poor TPS.
Wow. Pumpkin's runtime is way better (faster, much less RAM used) than the Java versions. Congrats.
I wonder what the Kotlin-based Minestom is doing differently that causes it to have numbers between Pumpkin and the Java versions.
For comparison's sake, do you have build times for Pumpkin? I'll assume that's where critics may target.
How bad could it be? I cry while async-stripe crate builds.
Compiling from Nothing
*Debug:* 10.35sec *Release:* 38.40sec
Recompilation (pumpkin crate)
*Debug:* 1.82sec *Release:* 28.68sec
I will put them into the benchmarks
The build times on async-stripe are inhumane. I wish the project didn't use so much codegen.
After learning that to make a minecraft mod the process was basically decompile minecraft fight the terrible names provided by the decompiler to make your changes then recompile it, I lost all interest.
[1] https://github.com/FabricMC/yarn
> Be a drop-in replacement for vanilla or other servers
It seems to me that unless it's a drop-in replacement its not a Minecraft server? Akin to how say an Uno deck isn't a drop-in replacement for a Hearts deck but still both card games but not both Uno decks.
Or is it just meaning that Pumpkin (besides the network) do things differently than vanilla and so you might not be able to open a vanilla created world using Pumpkin?
The only "complete" reimplementation of Java Minecraft that I'm aware of is Bedrock.
For example, in Java version if you take a circuit and activate it with a button/lever - it would always behave in the same way. In bedrock same setup could have random result. And "random" is something you don't want in a large sophisticated contraption.
I'd guess it's caused by some race-conditions in bedrock implementation, but alas it wasn't fixed in 7 years.
For example there there are tricks that allow you to delete bedrock blocks. Which then lets you either get onto the roof of the nether, or drop below the bottom of the world. Not all of these tricks will then work depending upon the specific minecraft server.
Another example is that in vanilla you can "bomb" people with experience orbs, the sheer number of orbs on the screen will grind their game to a halt since there are too many objects to track and render. Some minecraft servers work around this by grouping up experience orbs into a single bigger orb. That way you have fewer orbs on screen at once.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLynwXDnETI [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41798369
From what I remember , there was one other server as well which also was written in rust but I am not exactly sure
Also , the last time I was at it , it was really really alpha software but it was getting developed at good rate , so I am not sure about its current state (I was there when the author had gone to take his exams IIRC)
Ever since I started playing it in the beta days I've been frustrated with how poorly Minecraft performs relative to what it's showing on the screen. (Not that that stopped me from pouring hundreds of hours into the damn thing.)
most servers leave it enabled because preventing player impersonation is pretty important so people can't just easily grief each other. some piracy servers implemented their own auth on top.
I don't mind people rewriting things in <insert-name-of-tech-I-like> but "modern" as a value seems pretty loose, and it's often at least arguable whether it's objectively better!
Usually the hyperbolic superlative for Rust projects is “blazing fast”. Of course, any kind of benchmarks or comparisons with other implementations are completely optional. It is simply enough to “cargo init” and start hammering out code. You don’t even need to consider the characteristics of the algorithms you choose to use! If it’s Rust, it’s “blazing fast”.
It’s bad form to badmouth someone’s earnest work for sure. I wouldn’t do it normally since I think it’s nice that you actually did something. But if you’re going to sit in a glass house and throw stones you should expect some back.
Fortunately, my house is an underground burrow so I can throw stones with impunity. As ugly as it is to do.
Dig a little deeper in the repos and you may eventually find that this is exactly what that started as :^)
> badmouth someone’s earnest work for sure
Was speaking generally. Not meant at OP. I think it’s awesome that they are making a Minecraft server in Rust.
> Talk about pot calling the kettle black
Of course! Anything else would be bad form.
> my house is an underground burrow so I can throw stones with impunity
Sneaky, sneaky ;)
This, at least in my experience, applies greatly to software and hardware.
Well, there is research on this!
https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s... writes:
> vulnerabilities decay exponentially. They have a half-life. [...] A large-scale study of vulnerability lifetimes² published in 2022 in Usenix Security confirmed this phenomenon. Researchers found that the vast majority of vulnerabilities reside in new or recently modified code
Where ² goes to https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentat...
A study limitation is that they looked only at security-relevant bugs (vulnerabilities). As someone who writes code, I would tend to think that this also goes for bugs without a direct security impact, but I don't have the data to back that notion up
Java 6 had multi-threading
Iirc part of original Minecraft's performance limitations were high object create/destroy rate leading to lots of garbage collection. With that in mind, picking a non-GCd language isn't completely crazy.
Why pick 6, though?
(I've never written pre Java 6 code)
It was really funny. It felt like a Satire LMAO
E.g. sqlite probably wouldn't be called modern, but everyone loves it so who cares.
Am confused by these two lines. Maybe it is just difference between the 'goal' and the 'current state'.
Goal:
"Compatibility: Supports the latest Minecraft server version and adheres to vanilla game mechanics. "
But NOT:
"Be a drop-in replacement for vanilla or other servers "
Will it be a replacement for Vanilla or not?
Drop-in replacement: refer to the ability of a server operator to simply exchange the current installation/executable of the server (be vanilla, paper, cuberite, etc...) for pumpkin while maintaining data, configuration, scripts and mods installed.
edit: grammar
If it is compatible, then can't I 'drop it in'.
They sound like they are saying the same thing.
It is compatible so clients can connect to the server and be fully operational, and thus, I should be able to drop in this server, and use it as a server?
How can it be compatible if it doesn't maintain data, configuration, etc..
Edit: or is this about Pumpkin files. Pumpkin will maintain it's own files, data, configuration. So it can't just use existing Minecraft data files.
So if it was a new world, Pumpkin would generate new pumpkin formatted files. But couldn't just 'drop it in' on an existing world and use the existing Minecraft data files.
Not sure of long term viability as far as effort, but if it is files, couldn't a converter from MineCraft to Pumpkin file structure, make the server 'drop in'?
* nginx is not a drop in replacement for apache
But from a client perspective, both implement HTTP/1.1.
* podman is not a drop in replacement for docker
But from a client perspective connecting to a service hosted in docker, that connection can still occur over TCP.
On the other hand:
* pkgconf is a drop in replacement for pkg-config
* cronie is a drop in replacement for vixie-cron
This seems too low level example to apply for Minecraft.
Minecraft has a lot going on, back and forth. For something to be 'compatible' it would need to be so detailed an implementation of the server, that it could potentially also be a 'drop in'.
If I were to interpret the statement made here I would assume that not-a-drop-in while being vanilla compliant means things like:
* It won't support server side mods without you re-writing them in rust
* It won't support bukkit plugins without you re-writing them in rust
* It doesn't support the configuration file format that the java server uses
* Maybe it doesn't support the world file format (which would be server side only)
* Maybe it doesn't support the same administrative commands (which you would only see as an administrator)
etc.
So it can definitely be compatible from the client perspective while being woefully incompatible with any prior experience anyone running a minecraft server might have.
This is not compatible with other servers plugins/data/configurations, so just replacing the binary and expecting to continue where you left off is not possible.
Drop-in: You run a server for some time. You decide to switch the software by replacing the executable. Everything works as before.
This is especially true with complicated vanilla Minecraft setups and red stone machines (Java Minecraft red stone has "bugs" that "shouldn't be there" but cannot be removed now since so much depends on it).
By the time you are 'compatible' then you have implemented everything needed to also be a 'drop-in' but data file formats might need a conversion.
So convert from Minecraft data files to Pumpkin data files. Then it could drop in.
Even if they supply a tool, isn't it drop-in.
Otherwise I'd so no software in existence is really drop-in. Most of them have some update that has to happen.
I see it is not a drop in when using other tools, plug ins, 3rd party things.
But what about just a plain vanilla world.
Can Pumpkin read in and use the plain vanilla files? Does it do some kind of conversion and have it's own file structure?
So if I had a simple server, it could be a drop-in.
Or does the world need to be generated new inside Pumpkin? I can't use existing worlds.
Will it ever though? Is this a goal?
I think the Minecraft server is in Java exclusively because Notch was only proficient in that language at the time.
Aren’t mods more or less the primary justification for building a server like this?
Although Rust may in some ways improve performance, is that a better trade for the huge reduction in potential mods?
This is why people struggle with their servers, not because the game was written in java
That's why I struggle with the server: it's written in Java. Other game servers don't seem to have this problem. If the network protocol were all, that'd be great
(I didn't downvote any of your posts in case you now wonder if that was me)
- Feather (Rust, abandoned) https://github.com/feather-rs/feather
- Valence (Rust) https://github.com/valence-rs/valence
- Cuberite (C++) https://github.com/cuberite/cuberite
> A Rust framework for building Minecraft: Java Edition servers.
Through there are currently 3 new rust impl. differentiating themself from Valence. So it's interesting to see how this will develop long term. Like will they be for different use case(1)? Will they merge? Will some die and developers migrate?
(1): There are actually quite a lot of different use cases, i.e. Java Edition is by now mostly about mods so providing different modding capabilities and various "common mods build-in" and similar can be a big target. But so can be wanting to run a mostly vanilla community MC server for quite a bunch of people etc.