VortexSo4/Weft

Weft is a voxel sandbox game engine written in Rust. It targets people who want to play a Minecraft-like sandbox or build mods for one: the game that ships with it, mods/base, uses only the public SDK, so mods can extend or replace its content without private engine hooks.

What it does and how it works

The world consists of cubic 16x16x16 chunks with no height or depth limit, and terrain is generated on the GPU so distant terrain is drawn well beyond the view distance. Instead of random ticks, the world is split into regions ticked in parallel, and timed blocks catch up on time while their chunks were unloaded — crops and furnaces progress without the player being present. Blocks support colored RGB light, connected or randomized texture variants, and animated or glowing textures; models come from Blockbench with keyframe animations. Gameplay includes survival and creative modes, crafting and smelting, pathfinding mobs, bucket-handled liquids, energy-powered machines, and moving structures players can build on.

Mods are native libraries behind a C ABI, packed as zip archives and loaded in parallel. Content is registered through builders, behavior hooks through events, interceptors and value chains, and recipes, loot and world generation are driven by tags. The example mod and the modding cheat sheet show each registration pattern; mods/based is the game itself and mods/testmod demonstrates extending and replacing it. Resource packs, shader packs, in-game reloading of textures, translations, shaders and UI, debug overlays and a recipe viewer support development, and crash reports name the mod that was running.

Playing and requirements

Download a build from Releases, unpack it and run weft. A Vulkan-capable GPU is required; on macOS it is bundled and requires Apple Silicon with macOS 12 or newer. Windows is the main tested platform, while Linux and macOS are reported to work well. If Minecraft through the official launcher or Prism is installed, Weft builds a resource pack from that copy on startup; the pack stays local and can be disabled under Settings > Resource Packs. From source, building needs Rust 1.90 or newer and must be run from the repository root.

Early-stage caveats

The project is explicitly early: the mod interface and save format can still change between versions. A mod built against another engine version refuses to load and asks to be rebuilt rather than crashing, but existing worlds and mods are not guaranteed to remain compatible across updates. Weft is unrelated to Mojang or Microsoft, does not read Minecraft worlds, and contains no Minecraft code or assets.

MPL-2.0 applies to the code; check the license for terms when redistributing or modifying it.