By
@ilfattorino
The revival of the Minecraft Decimation mod with a custom built launcher, featuring entirely new graphics, logic and functionality.
9h 59m 22s logged
Singleplayer is running great. No crashes, no blockers, nothing hanging on startup. Everything works as intended: Food and Drinks are usable, Weapons shoot, reload and work fully, Bombs the same, Cars are Driveable, Glider works, Clothes protect and are wearable
Piece by piece i’ve been reconstructing every message type the client sends and expects back matching the exact wire format so nothing breaks on either end. At this point the server correctly handles:
A few message types are still open (server list population, some global stats, in-game notifications), but the core loop, the stuff a player actually touches every session is in and working.
The panel in the top-right corner of the client is now pulling its data straight from the network, live, with no issues. That data isn’t hardcoded or cached it’s a real pulled from the server like it’s supposed to. Getting that thing stable was one of the trickier parts of this whole stretch given how many layers of networking had to line up first but it’s paying off now.
Individually none of these matter much, Together they mean the actual hard part (the plumbing nobody sees) is done and holding up. Singleplayer works, the network path from client to server works, the core gameplay data (kills, deaths, profiles, supporter status) is being tracked correctly.
The next stretch of work is the hardest, filling in the remaining protocol gaps (server list, global stats, notifications) and starting to build the launcher
Thanks for sticking with this rebuild. Hop into the Discord if you want to follow updates discord.gg/decimation
7h 27m 33s logged
Hello everyone new updates!!
The original mod talked to a server over raw TCP/UDP sockets (using a Java networking library called KryoNet) for things like player stats, the server list screen, and update checks. That backend was never open source and doesn’t exist anymore, so I’ve been writing a brand new one that speaks the exact same “language” the client expects matching its wire protocol message by message so the old client just works against new server code without needing to be rewritten itself.
So far that new server handles:
Player profiles (kills/deaths/stats)
The in game server list
Live player count
More message types (server-side crash reports, supporter status, the update system) are getting added one at a time as I work through them.
Networking infrastructure.
Got a relay set up so the client’s existing hardcoded connection info actually reaches the new server, DNS pointed at the right place, and both sides talking over the same ports without falling over which involved learning more about TCP vs UDP port binding and firewall/security groups than I expected to going in.
Fixed a pile of dead links. A handful of things the mod calls out to at runtime (update checks, a resource pack, some JSON it fetches for the main menu) pointed at old GitHub links that don’t exist anymore. Tracked those down one at a time and replaced them with working equivalents, including chasing down a sneaky “blocked because of the default Java user-agent” issue that looked like a permissions bug at first.
46m 32s logged
Hey everyone, It’s been a while but Decimation is alive again. I want to give you a real update on where things stand, because a lot has happened behind the scenes and I don’t want that work to go unnoticed. (and i have no clue why it logged only 46m over the +100 hours of work done but whatever.)
Like some of you may know, development on Decimation stalled a long time ago and the original source code was never made public. For a long time that meant the mod was effectively frozen, no fixes, no updates, no working mod. Over the past weeks I’ve been working on reviving the project from the ground up: rebuilding a working development environment, restoring the codebase to a buildable state, and getting the whole thing running on modern tooling instead of the outdated setup it originally shipped with.
This has been a genuinely massive undertaking. We’re talking about thousands of individual issues that needed to be worked through one by one, some tiny, some structural, across a codebase that spans dozens of systems. It has not been a quick job, and there were several points where the smart move was to stop, rethink the approach, and redo work rather than push forward on a shaky foundation.
The immediate focus now is functional testing, going system by system to confirm everything behaves the way it’s supposed to, catching runtime issues that don’t show up until you actually play the mod, and gradually cleaning up the codebase so future changes are easier to make than this initial recovery was.
I’m not going to promise a release date, because anyone who’s done a project like this knows those promises tend to age badly. What I can promise is that this isn’t a “one big push and abandon it again” situation, the goal is to get Decimation back to a state where it can actually be maintained and built upon going forward.
