Show HN: Pumpkin – A Modern Minecraft server written in Rust

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.

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

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).

[1] https://github.com/CaffeineMC/phosphor-fabric

[2] https://github.com/PaperMC/Starlight

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.

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.

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.

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.