Kovarust is yet another free Minecraft clone, but with the simple goal of actually being a viable alternative to the original.

Where other attempts at recreating the classic game have failed, whether that's from lack of technical features, lack of being finished, or lack of RAM left to actually play the game, I aim to double down on those issues and create an expansive, efficient, and most importantly enjoyable experience.

Modding, customization, and all that will be well-supported and hopefully even more easily accessible than Java Edition. There won't be any patching bytecode, or relying on an arbitrary server to display a colourful rectangle behind your player model. No Robux either, or having political agendas shoved down your throat on the title screen, for that matter.

Just a good 'ol block game where the sky's the limit.

FAQ

Why don't you just play Minetest like all the other anti-microsofters?

Because there aren't many of us who would sacrifice gameplay features to make a statement nobody cares about. Kovarust can't just be an anti-big-tech protest, but a fully-fledged game that is actually worth playing before you even look at the above point.

Why don't you just play an old version of MC if you hate the new ones so much?

Because it's missing a community, features, and development. You're stuck in an ecosystem of old mods, which there's nothing wrong with, but people are bored of it.

Kovarust will have a (reasonably) stable protocol for modding, so even if new mods aren't being developed, you should (using Minecraft as an example) be able to mix & match ancient classics like Project Red with something new like Create.

Nice website!

Thanks! That's not a question though.

What's the root password?

Go away, Git.

When will this thing be done?

At the moment there's just me working on the whole game by my lonesome, and I'm pretty busy as it is (just one more side-project, I promise!). Check the other pages for more details, but in its current state, OpenMiner is more complete than Kovarust, so the timeline's in the range of years.

Hopefully Minecraft will survive until then...

How about getting AI to--

No, absolutely no AI. It doesn't know WTF it's doing and will definitely overcomplicate stuff and introduce bugs. I will gladly take on the role of hand-crafting everything myself if need be.

The only place for AI in Kovarust may be in an "intelligent villager" mod so players can talk to and instruct in-game mobs, which would be cool, but it also will need to be designed well so it's 1. performant and 2. sandboxed so nothing retarded from the model's biases makes it into Kovarust. But TL;DR it's not writing/contaminating any code.

Have you heard of Bevy, the pure-Rust game engine?

I've got this thing against game engines in general. They try to handle everything for you, be the most versatile system out there, but they can never give you anything near the amount of control or understanding of underlying systems.

I've got a little bit of experience writing game loops from scratch if I do say so myself, making complete games in Processing and the like in my earlier years, so I'm confident it'll go fine without a hindrance like Bevy. It's kinda like the argument against compilers in the good 'ol days.

Ok but have you actually tried--

Yes, I've actually tried Bevy. My first attempt at Kovarust was using it, and honestly I think there's a lot to be desired.

My first mistake was focusing on the graphics aspect before anything else which is arguably the least important part. After getting stuck not knowing how to animate textures, and without all that much documentation on writing shaders for Bevy, I gave up and decided to write my own renderer from scratch so I knew how it worked back to front. Heck, I don't even know if it'd be possible to run Bevy as a headless server, or just with conditionally-rendered elements.

Also, Bevy "tries" to multi-thread by itself, but how is it gonna know to tick all nearby chunks at the same time, while far-away ones can be independent? Minecraft is the kind of technical game where these things need to be consistent.

Finally - how the hell are plugins going to work if you can't even mark stuff as #[no_mangle]? Rust's FFI support is lacking in the first place, and Bevy's is abysmal. Maybe there's a stabby-fied port of it but I may as well make my own "engine".

Tokio?

Meh.