git-craft

A performance-focused, Minecraft-style voxel engine written in Rust on wgpu, targeting modern shader-pack visuals at a 384-block render distance and 120 fps on Apple M4.

Disclaimer: git-craft is an independent, fan-made project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with Mojang Studios or Microsoft. "Minecraft" is a trademark of Mojang Synergies AB.

Why git-craft?

Minecraft's direction no longer matches what many players and builders want, and the community has always been able to dream bigger than the official roadmap — but it could never touch the engine itself. git-craft is the other path: a voxel sandbox that is open to the engine, built in public, and grown by its community. And because AI coding agents have matured, contributing no longer requires deep prior knowledge of the codebase — point your agent at our docs and guardrails and it can carry real work. This is an experiment in what a community can build on its own, with agents as force-multipliers. Read the full story in VISION.md — then come build with us.

Features

• Voxel world — greedy-meshed chunks, infinite streaming worldgen, cave culling.
• Lighting — cascaded shadow maps (CSM), flood-fill block/sky light.
• Modern post-processing — GTAO, TAA, volumetric in-scatter, bloom, ACES tone mapping.
• Atmosphere — Hillaire sky/aerial-perspective LUTs, day/night cycle.
• Water — transparent refraction with screen-space reflections and a sky-LUT fallback.
• Performance discipline — forward TBDR-friendly pipeline, per-pass GPU timestamps in the F3 HUD, a render-scale safety valve, --bench percentile reporting.

Build & Run

Requires a recent Rust toolchain (edition 2024 → Rust ≥ 1.85). The primary tested platform is macOS on Apple Silicon (Metal).

cd git-craft
cargo run --release

Release builds only. Debug builds are intentionally slow for voxel work — the Cargo.toml profile overrides already raise opt-level to keep them merely usable, not fast.

Controls

Input	Action
W A S D	Move
Mouse	Look
Left Ctrl	Sprint (and fly-sprint)
Space	Jump (walk) / ascend (fly)
Double-tap Space or F	Toggle walk/fly mode
Left Shift	Descend (fly mode)
Left click	Break block
Right click	Place block
1–9	Select hotbar slot
Scroll wheel	Cycle hotbar (hold Shift to page)
F3 or H	Toggle debug HUD
R	Cycle render scale (1.0 → 0.75 → 0.5)
V	Toggle cave culling
G	Toggle GTAO debug view
B	Toggle volumetric in-scatter debug view
Esc	Release the mouse (click to re-grab)

Architecture

A single Rust binary crate. The engine core (meshing, lighting, worldgen, physics, palette storage) is written as pure functions over plain data and unit-tested; rendering is a forward pipeline built for Apple's tile-based deferred (TBDR) GPUs — no Z-prepass, precise load/store ops, alpha-tested geometry in its own pass after opaque. WGSL shaders live under git-craft/assets/shaders/.

Tech stack: wgpu 29, winit, glam, bytemuck, egui, rayon, fastnoise-lite.

Project status

Early but actively developed. Milestones M1–M5 (foundation, world, playable loop, lighting, shader-pack visuals) are complete; M6 (persistence, textures, performance) is next.

Documentation

Documentation is a permanent, first-class part of this repo.

• Vision & mission: VISION.md
• Changelog: CHANGELOG.md
• Design spec: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-06-11-dabcraft-design.md
• Milestone plans: docs/superpowers/plans/

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md and our Code of Conduct. This project is built to be developed with AI agents: if you use one, point it at AGENTS.md first.

References

Rendering techniques are implemented from published work:

• ACES filmic tone mapping — Stephen Hill's fit of the Academy Color Encoding System.
• Atmosphere — Sébastien Hillaire, "A Scalable and Production Ready Sky and Atmosphere Rendering Technique" (EGSR 2020).
• GTAO — Jorge Jiménez et al., "Practical Real-Time Strategies for Accurate Indirect Occlusion" (SIGGRAPH 2016).

License

Dual-licensed under either of:

• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT)
• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE)

at your option. Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this project shall be dual-licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.