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

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??

It makes sense that a very popular language would be being used to make one of the most popular projects.

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.

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.

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.

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.