Monicraft - Mods list, Server kill, Navigation buttons & UI/UX improvements

• I’ve added buttons to navigate between screens. I forgot to add this last time, so travelling between screens was a bit tricky.
• You’re now able to kill the server for when the server get’s stuck in a shutdown or crashes. It will sent a confirmation pop-up message upon the first click, telling you to click another time to confirm. This lasts for 10 seconds and then it will reset.
• I’ve also added a new screen with a list of all the mods you’ve installed on the server, including name, file size and last changed date.
• The UI/UX is now alot more stable. I had orginally designed everything on my monitor. But when I would use it on my laptop screen, the whole UI collapsed. So I made everything a bit smaller.

Future plans:

This project is close to being finished, but I want to add two last features.

• Player management: Quickly see who’s online on the server and manage them (kick, ban, whitelist, unwhitelist)
• Version manager: See what versions of Minecraft, Java and mod loader you’re using and modify them.

I spend my time today and yesterday to learn Python. So i did some assignments to learn it a bit. I made a little game guess the number with helped a lot to learn!

My plan for now on is to make a calculator for minecraft weapon damage. I still need to start working on it. But atleast im a bit more familiar with python.

I really want to get better at Python. So when a friend of mine invited me i started working!
I came up with the idea because i play Minecraft a lot and i was curious how the game calculates the damage. And a Sword is a bit basic. But the Mace and the Spear work allot differently.

I also switched from VS code to Antigravity IDE. So ai could help me more easy when i need it to.

Here is a screenshot of my guess the number game.

Monicraft - Settings, Power action buttons, Visual Improvements

• I’ve added a settings page where you can configure your API key, Panel endpoint and Server ID. It has a save button and automatically saves when leaving the screen, which writes the inputs to an .env file. You can also reset these value’s.
• I’ve added power action buttons, which can be used to start, restart or stop your minecraft server.
• I’ve added pop-up toasts for errors and informative messages.
• I’ve improved the connection funtions to retry every 5 seconds when the connection is lost.

Future Plans:

• Adding a button to navigate to the settings menu (it is now accessed by sending the settings command).
• Version manager for Java, Minecraft and Mods.

Monicraft - Server resources viewer, Sending commands, Chat mode & Styling

• The console now works properly. It now streams the console directly from your Minecraft server to your terminal trough websockets.
• The server resources (RAM usage, CPU usage and server state) are now visible in a sidebar and are constantly being updated.
• It’s now possible to send commands to the server using the input bar at the bottom. I also added a extra “Chat Mode”, it basically puts say in front of every command you send, which makes it easier to chat with the people that are online on your server.
• The style has been upgraded. I went for a green/nature looking style, because I like the color palette.

Bugs and Future Plans:

• The Chat Mode button doesn’t change color until you move your cursor after you clicked it, not a big problem, but it is kinda confusing.
• I wanna add the option to view/update/remove your installed mods on the server and give more insight into the installed version of modloader.

First devlog for Monicraft!

How I came up with the idea:
I was just thinking about what I could possibly make, I felt like coding, but I just didn’t know what I should make. So I just started playing minecraft as always, on the server with my friends. When I was changing something on the server panel, I was wondering how the panel really works. It turns out almost every hosting provider uses the Pterodactyl dashboard. It relies on a REST API, which is publicly available to anyone. I decided to try and recreate such a panel, but in Python.

The foundation:
The connection with the Pterodactyl API is established trough websockets. I decided to start with a screen which is an overview of the main server resources (such as CPU usage, RAM usage and Storage usage) and the console. The GUI is build with Textual and customized by the built-in TCSS.

What I have done so far:

• Setup the main code space
• Do some research about the API and learn how Textual works
• Design the UI shape
• Connection with the API trough websockets (WIP)

I initially started this project to learn more about API’s and specifically websockets. I also wanted to see how it would be to build a GUI app in python and if it’s really as hard/bad-looking as everyone says.

First devlog for Monicraft!

How I came up with the idea:
I was just thinking about what I could possibly make, I felt like coding, but I just didn’t know what I should make. So I just started playing minecraft as always, on the server with my friends. When I was changing something on the server panel, I was wondering how the panel really works. It turns out almost every hosting provider uses the Pterodactyl dashboard. It relies on a REST API, which is publicly available to anyone. I decided to try and recreate such a panel, but in Python.

The foundation:
The connection with the Pterodactyl API is established trough websockets. I decided to start with a screen which is an overview of the main server resources (such as CPU usage, RAM usage and Storage usage) and the console. The GUI is build with Textual and customized by the built-in TCSS.

What I have done so far:

• Setup the main code space
• Do some research about the API and learn how Textual works
• Design the UI shape
• Connection with the API trough websockets (WIP)

I initially started this project to learn more about API’s and specifically websockets. I also wanted to see how it would be to build a GUI app in python and if it’s really as hard/bad-looking as everyone says.

I’m now officially done with this project. You can see a preview on https://asciinema.org/a/vIZ6F7bfI0mkdDf5. I really happy with what it turned out to be. I learned alot of json formatting, database data flow and code structure. This is the final product:

The Wandering Modder

A fast, AI-driven search engine for Minecraft modding. It fetches data via the Modrinth API and uses a local ChromaDB vector database, allowing you to search for mods, shaders, datapacks, resource packs and plugins using natural language.

Installation

Windows:

git clone [https://github.com/Camiel13/The-Wandering-Modder.git](https://github.com/Camiel13/The-Wandering-Modder.git) the_wandering_modder
cd the_wandering_modder
pip install -r requirements.txt

Linux:

git clone [https://github.com/Camiel13/The-Wandering-Modder.git](https://github.com/Camiel13/The-Wandering-Modder.git) the_wandering_modder
cd the_wandering_modder
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

To start execute this command:

python3 main.py

The Wandering Modder Commands

You have to replace {project_type} with one of the following project types: mod, datapack, resourcepack, shader or plugin. Make sure to describe your project in keywords (e.g. redstone, technical, components, wires)!

{project_type} init - Sets up the searching of a specific project type. !! REQUIRED !!
{project_type} query - Search the built database for specific mods with keywords.
help - Shows all the commands available.
clear - Clears the terminal.
exit / quit - Shuts down the program.

Hardware Acceleration

You can make the process of building the vector database up to 10-50x faster by using a dedicated Nvidia GPU with the CUDA toolkit. This is done by replacing the normal package with a GPU-supported variant and installing the CUDA toolkit onto your system. Note that this can only be done when using a Nvidia GPU with the proper installation of the CUDA toolkit and using recent drivers!

pip uninstall onnxruntime
pip install onnxruntime-gpu

The Wandering Modder

This project is close to being finished.

• I’ve made sure the output looks nice and is visually attractive by using the rich.panel module.
• I added more detail to the metadata saved in the vector database, so I could show it in the output
• I updated the README.md with installing and usage instructions.

Last things I wanna add:

• Hardware acceleration
• Accuracy improvements

The Wandering Modder - Database updating, result formatting and code refactoring

• I’ve finished the update_database() function completely to make sure unfinished databases are complete or to put new (versions of) projects into databases without having to rebuild the whole database. The hardest part was getting the data from the already existing database and comparing it to the new data, since they used diffrent formatting.
• I’ve implemented a format_results() function to make the results into beautiful frames with the rich library. This feature is not completely finished.

My future plans are finishing the format_results() function to make it print beautiful panels into the terminal. I also wanna make the results more accurate to what you type.

The Wandering Modder

I’ve started working on improving the performance of building the database, so that it doesn’t take an hour of building each time you wanna update the mods.

So far I’ve implemented:

• A new function called update_database() that first checks what projects are new to the database by extracting the metadata of the already existing database and comparing them to the new data.

What I wanna implement in the future:

• Hardware acceleration

I’ve also investigated how I built this project a month ago, because it’s a total mess and I have some issue understanding some things. So I refactored some code and did some small changes.

The Wandering Modder

I created this project in May. I wanted to make a better search engine for the Minecraft modders, since the popular minecraft websites often just didn’t find correlating mods, just mods that exactly matched or contained your search.

I’ve read back in, because it was a while ago since I started this project. Firstly I’ve improved the cli command syntax checker to make it less clutterd and less if- else-statements. I’ve also tested if everything was intact and if the correct rate limits we’re respected.