Projects Dust MC
Project 02
A Minecraft server, written from scratch in Rust.
A Minecraft: Java Edition server implementation written entirely in Rust, from scratch. No fork, no vendored code. It targets 1.21.1 first, and the plan runs to nineteen phases across five stages, each with a written exit criterion.
The timeline is three to four years to a usable release. That is in our notes as an honest figure, not a hedge.
We re-examined this once the licence made an existing Rust server legally usable as a base, and looked hard at what we would be inheriting. Worldgen turned out to be the one area we could least afford to take on someone else's terms.
A fix does not repair the world it has already produced. So Phase 6's exit criterion is not "the terrain looks right" — it is block-identical output against a real vanilla server across ten seeds. Every one of those defects is a parity defect, and ordinary unit tests pass straight over them.
Early. Configuration, the server lifecycle, the 1.21.1 protocol layer, chunk storage and a full light-propagation engine are written and tested. It does not yet accept a player connection.
The packet codec was written multi-version from commit one, because retrofitting it is a rewrite. Protocol work is done against decompiled sources rather than community wiki data — and where the two disagree, the decompile wins.
Rust runs everything. Java exists in exactly two bounded places: an embedded JVM, because plugins genuinely are compiled bytecode, and a launcher jar that hosting panels expect. A standing CI test enforces it — with the JVM disabled the server must still boot and every feature except plugin loading must work.
Terrain baselines arrive from an extraction step run against a server jar the operator already has. It started as a licensing boundary and improved the design: a resolver that hard-coded vanilla's figures would be quietly wrong on every modded world.
One config file. A field with no documentation comment is a compile error. Environment overrides are overlaid before deserialisation so they get identical type checking. An unknown ore name is an error that names the closest match, not a setting that quietly does nothing.
A count is written against one baseline and stops meaning what its author intended the moment a datapack changes that baseline — silently, because the number is still valid. A multiplier composes with the world instead of fighting it.
Dust MC is GPL-3.0 and public. Read it, build it, or file an issue.
Dust-MC on GitHub