For the past year I've been working on Oxide, a Minecraft server written from scratch in Rust.

Currently supported features include:

  - Multiple players with basic interactions (see item in hand or armor and their position)
  - Chat (without encryption) and some basic commands
  - Placing and breaking blocks (very few block state rules implemented)
  - Loading and saving vanilla worlds
  - Creative mode

You can also spin up your own with docker, see my example docker-compose.yml[1]

Because this is supposed to be a learning opportunity, I have opted to use as few external dependencies or LLM help as possible. At the moment, the only crate I depend on is flate2 for compression/decompression and jzon in my tooling.

I'm also making videos about the progress and how different features work and are implemented.[2] My favorite so far is about how Minecraft stores worlds to disk.[3]

While I'm of course not the first one to make a Minecraft server in Rust[4], its still been a great learning opportunity! I look forward to implementing more features, like block entities, entities, multiple dimensions and online mode.

I also just released the first version 0.1 a couple of days ago. Of course I also made a video about that[5], which I also adapted into a blog post[6]. In there I explain more about what this project is.

  [1] https://git.thetxt.io/thetxt/oxide/raw/branch/main/docker-compose.yml
  [2] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLht_DnAZ_Av4UZwQGhz7aNDMH9pfI0ein
  [3] https://youtu.be/P3SBNN_b7-Q
  [4] https://dayssincelastrustmcserver.com/
  [5] https://youtu.be/z4tAE1xLB3o
  [6] https://thetxt.io/blog/2025-08-29-releasing-oxide