Minecraft 2

The world is a sparse voxel structure marched directly in compute shaders. Resolution, traced lighting, arbitrary destruction and traced audio all come from the same acceleration structure. There is no mesh, no greedy meshing pass, no LOD that turns a mountain into a handful of quads.

Not affiliated with Mojang or Microsoft. The name is a joke that got out of hand; the renderer is not.

Under construction. Systems land in the order at the bottom; each is tagged when it runs. Flora, towns, survival and a gamepad already do.

Gallery

Why

Minecraft's world becomes a triangle mesh. Meshes are a poor fit for a game where the player can carve 6.25 cm of rock out of a 16 km continent, then stand in the hole and look at the sky through the gap.

This engine never builds that mesh. A brickmap of palette-compressed voxels sits under per-chunk 64-trees. A compute shader marches it. Soft shadows, bounce light, reflections, clouds and fog all trace the same tree. When a blast throws debris, the fragments are rigid bodies marched with the terrain. When a column is cut, load flows through real materials and the tower comes down as pieces you can walk on.

The CPU reference marcher and the GPU marcher are checked pixel for pixel. Golden images run on WARP so CI does not depend on a vendor.

Play

Rust stable (edition 2024) and a GPU with Vulkan, DX12 or Metal.

git clone https://github.com/Anandb71/minecraft-2.git
cd minecraft-2
cargo run --release

Left click captures the mouse. A pad starts play on the first stick or button. The first launch erodes the world (about 30 s) and caches it under worlds/default.

cargo run --release -- --creative
cargo run --release -- --seed 7 --time 21.5
cargo run --release -- --capture shot.png --frames 120 --size 2560x1440

Full flags, quality tiers and tests: docs/getting-started.md. Keys, pad and photo mode: docs/controls.md.

What is in

World. 16 km grown from geology: a few plates. Where they collide, a ridged range; where they pull apart, a rift; where they slide, a scarp. Eroded once by a virtual-pipe hydraulic model. Stratified rock (basement, cyclic sediments, folds, volcanic provinces) exposed by that erosion. Ores that follow their host. Four LODs streamed on worker threads; buried rock is not generated until someone digs.

Biomes and settlements. Climate cools with height, and a steep north face cools further, so snow and the tree line sit lower there. Limestone country keeps a thin soil. Oak and birch forest, pine and snowy taiga, plains, desert, alpine rock and snow, beaches and sea. Villages around a plaza and well. Towns on a street grid with lamps, parks and glass towers, lit at night. Caves dissolve limestone, chalk and marble along joints and bedding, break the surface on a hillside, flood below a water table, and grow stalactites where they stay dry.

Renderer. Visibility buffer with exact voxel ids. Physically based sky (Hillaire 2020). Traced soft shadows. ReSTIR from every emissive cluster. Radiance cascades or ReSTIR GI. SVGF. Volumetric clouds that shadow the ground. Froxel fog with light shafts. Glossy reflections. AgX. Photo mode with focal length, focus, aperture and exposure.

Fire and weather. Blocks burn by what they hold, spread uphill and downwind, char wood to charcoal and light the night; water and rain put them out. Clear, cloudy, rain and storm drift by with the wind: rain soaks open ground into glossy stone and mirror puddles, snow falls where it is cold, and lightning comes down as a real bolt of light that can start a fire.

Water. Free-surface lattice Boltzmann on the GPU in half-metre cells, written back into the voxel world as it flows, so it is lit, refracted and reflected like everything else. The sea stays still until you dig beside it, then pours in. Buckets carry it.

Destruction. XPBD rigid bodies. TNT with fuses and chain reactions. Structural integrity over the 1 m block layer: an unsupported stone arm snaps at about 3 m, a plank one at 23 m, soil cannot overhang at all. Collapses become debris, then terrain again once they settle.

Play. First and third person, voxel collision, step-up, crouch, fly. Build on the 1 m grid or carve 6.25 cm voxels. Survival with hardness, tools that wear out, 36 slots, 44 recipes, a furnace. Creative is a flag. Xbox-layout gamepad.

Engine. Own frame graph. GPU timestamps on every pass. WGSL hot reload in debug. Brick streaming from marcher feedback, so unseen surfaces never cost VRAM.

Architecture

flowchart TB
  subgraph app ["minecraft-2"]
    window["window · input · photo"]
  end
  window --> game
  window --> render
  game["mc2-game"] --> voxel
  worldgen["mc2-worldgen"] --> voxel
  physics["mc2-physics"] --> voxel
  structure["mc2-structure"] --> voxel
  render["mc2-render"] --> voxel
  render --> fluid["mc2-fluid"]
  game --> fluid
  render --> gpu["mc2-gpu"]
  voxel["mc2-voxel"] --> core["mc2-core"]
  gpu --> core

6.25 cm voxels, 4-bit palette bricks, per-chunk 64-trees. Physics at 120 Hz on its own thread (4 ms tick). The frame budget is 16.6 ms at 1440p / 60 fps on a mid-range 2024 discrete GPU.

Crate map, invariants and the budget table: docs/architecture.md. Why each fork went the way it did: DECISIONS.md. What it cost: DEVLOG.md.

Status

	Step	Tag
done	Harness, frame graph, HUD, golden CI	v0.1-harness
done	Brickmap, 64-tree, CPU marcher	v0.2-brickmap
done	GPU marcher, visibility, brick streaming	v0.3-marcher
done	Worldgen v1, streaming, LOD	v0.4-worldgen
done	Player, collision, carve and place	v0.5-player
done	Sky, traced shadows, ReSTIR	v0.6-lighting
done	Indirect light, denoise, upsample	v0.7-indirect
done	Reflections, volumetrics, clouds, photo mode	v0.8-atmosphere
done	Rigid bodies, destruction	v0.9-destruction
done	Structural integrity	v0.10-structure
done	Water: lattice Boltzmann on the GPU	v0.11-fluids
done	Fire, heat, wind, weather	v0.12-weather
now	Worldgen v2: tectonics, caves, ecology
done	Animation, IK, ragdolls	v0.14-animation
done	NPCs, economy, vehicles	v0.15-people
done	Traced audio	v0.16-audio
next	Persistence, settings, polish

Flora, settlements, survival and the gamepad landed beside that list, not instead of it.

Contributing

Bugs, measurements and small fixes are welcome. New dependencies and architectural rewrites need a conversation: this repo keeps a written record of why the last choice won.

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Be decent: CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md. Vulnerabilities: SECURITY.md.

cargo fmt --all
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace

Author

Anand B (@Anandb71)

I care about engines you can measure. If a pass is over budget, the HUD turns red. If two architectures are on the table, DECISIONS.md says what was timed and what was cut.

License

MIT. Copyright 2026 Anand B.