With 300 million copies sold, Minecraft is the best-selling game ever made.
Now, over 12 years after its release, a gang of unpaid modders and renegade shader devs have pulled off something amazing: turning the blocky blockbuster into one of the most visually impressive games on any platform.
This week I spoke with some of the hobbyist devs driving the graphical revolution that’s making Mojang’s masterpiece look like Minecraft 2.
That story below. But first, this week’s spiciest games industry news links.
Scuttlebutt and Slackery
The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.
NetEase Reveals Marvel Rivals - The extremely Overwatch-y 6v6 shooter is being led by a team including former Call of Duty and Battlefield devs, and will run its first major alpha test this May. Not every Marvel game is a surefire hit these days, but this one looks polished enough to be a real contender. (Marvel Entertainment)
Embracer Sells Gearbox to Take-Two for $460 Million - The purchase price is sharply lower than the (estimated) $1.3 billion deal that saw Embracer acquire Gearbox only three years ago. This week’s sale resulted in layoffs that seem to have heavily impacted Gearbox Publishing, though Embracer retains the publishing rights for certain games—including Hyper Light Breaker—which were scheduled to release under that label. (Embracer)
Sega Employees Ratify a First-of-its-Kind Union Contract - The agreement establishes regular raises for some employees and a variety of binding layoff protections. In a LinkedIn comment, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier elaborated, saying that “Sega is obligated to inform the union 10 days before telling employees, giving the union an opportunity to react/bargain/fight for buyouts/etc.” (Game Developer)
$400,000 Worth of Playdate Consoles Disappear in Las Vegas - A tragic followup to last week’s Push to Talk feature on the Playdate community: it looks likely that someone stole two massive pallets of Playdates. Many remain missing, but Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser said that clues have been uncovered, as some Playdates seem to have been distributed around the Las Vegas area. “It’s a bit of a true crime drama,” Sasser said. (Game File)
This is Minecraft
Minecraft has always had a bustling mods scene and cutting-edge homebrewed shaders that upgrade things like shadows, lighting, and textures. Mojang themselves have been cranking up the visual fidelity of the game over the years as well, with updates including official support for ray tracing in 2020.
But in the last few weeks a new consensus has emerged among the game’s players and content creators: what’s now possible with Minecraft mods is unlike anything seen before.
A collection of fan-made mods and shaders—particularly the render-distance enhancing Distant Horizons 2.0 mod—make Minecraft look like a true next-gen title.
Perhaps most impressively: these mods aren’t nearly as resource-hungry as you might expect, and don’t require the very latest and greatest graphics cards to run. Although the mods naturally run best on more powerful hardware, they have the potential to change the game for many players.
As one YouTuber put it: “Minecraft will never be the same.”
How to Extend the Horizons
Three years ago, James Seibel was a computer science student at Bethel University, a private Christian university in Minnesota. He’d toyed around with Minecraft off-and-on in the decade since its original release, and always found the game’s view distance to be overly limited.
Growing up in North Dakota, “huge skies and massive vistas are the norm,” Seibel says, “so going into Minecraft where you can only see about 100 feet in any given direction always felt... wrong.”
As Seibel considered the issues with Minecraft’s render distance, he thought back to one of his favorite childhood games, the 2007 PC real-time strategy game Supreme Commander. Even now, Seibel says, SupCom remains one of his favorite games to play with his brothers.
But Supreme Commander has a flaw: “When it was made, most CPUs had one, maybe two cores, so it was only designed to utilize three threads (simulation, rendering, and audio), which in a game all about massive simulated battles, became an issue rather quickly, especially on modern CPUs with four or more cores.”
Learning about this limitation led Seibel to an epiphany: “I realized that your hardware may not be the limiting factor in your game's performance. And Minecraft, in some ways, is very similar to Supreme Commander. It can scale almost infinitely but is limited by its software implementation. If you only ever run the majority of your logic on a single thread, most of your CPU will be idle while one core is doing all the work.”
Having gone through several hardware upgrades since 2012, Seibel says he realized that “no amount of hardware was going to make that much of a difference” for the game’s rendering distance. He began to wonder: what if he could improve the game’s software to render distant landscapes more efficiently?
In 2021, with only a single semester OpenGL class under his belt, Seibel set to work on a proof-of-concept, still viewable on Distant Horizon’s YouTube channel.
“This implementation renders simplified chunks outside the normal render distance,” Seibel explains in the video description, “allowing for an increased view distance without harming performance. Or in other words: this mod lets you see farther without turning your game into a slide show.”
The response from the community was enthusiastic. Emboldened, Seibel kept at it. Later that year, he revealed a major update. “Mojang should hire you,” one commenter declared.
By 2022, the mod was getting even better, earning more praise from Minecraft players. “My laptop barely runs vanilla Minecraft at 8 chunks render distance, and this mod lets me see 512 chunks without a single problem,” one commenter said.
“This single mod is going to change everything,” predicted another.
A “2.0” update to the mod released late last year cemented Distant Horizons’s reputation as a top Minecraft mod. Seibel’s videos were getting hundreds of thousands of views. Other modders have begun calling his work “mind blowing.”
Today Seibel has a full-time job as a software developer, and has by now spent years working on the Distant Horizons project, sometimes to the detriment of his own health. He says that during the development of the 2.0 update, he spent “every waking hour outside of work” toiling on the project, “which wasn’t mentally healthy.”
He calls the recent attention the project has gotten “flattering and overwhelming,” but hopes to be able to fix remaining issues and bugs with the project soon so it can hopefully require less of his attention.
The stress of working on a project like this is mostly self-imposed, Seibel admits. But, he asks: “Who else is gonna do it?”
The Beauty and Bliss of Shaders
Whenever you see content creators gushing over the power of the Distant Horizons mod, they’re almost always running additional community-made shaders to enhance Minecraft’s lighting and overall sense of realism. And one of the most popular shaders out there is Bliss, created by a developer known as Xonk.
Bliss is typically installed using the popular Iris shader loader mod, and adds everything from reflections on surfaces and more detailed shadows to atmospheric effects and richer foliage.
Xonk, who I spoke with over Discord, tells me that he had no prior programming experience before he dove into the world of Minecraft shaders. After discovering shaders made by a dev named Chocapic13, he began learning how shaders worked in Minecraft “through trial and error, just breaking code and trying my best to understand.”
Tweaking shaders involves a lot of math, which Xonk says is his weak spot. But he learned from other shader programmers and began editing chocapic13’s source code directly.
Eventually, he’d differentiated his branch of Chocapic13’s source code enough to justify publishing it as a separate shader—and thus Bliss was born.
Despite the fact that Bliss is one of the most popular Minecraft shaders available—it features in almost every video about the Distant Horizons mod—Xonk insists that he’s “still in the middle of learning shader making,” and that he’s “nowhere near as experienced or knowledgeable as the other shader devs.”
“I'm still building off of Chocapic13's strong base,” Xonk says. He [made] a really fast shader. It gave me room to code terribly and still have the shader run well.”
Xonk has even higher ambitions for Bliss’s future capabilities, but downplays his own talents: “I am constantly hitting the limits of my own knowledge when trying to make stuff, and overcoming those roadblocks really boosts my motivation to try and do more things with it. There are so many things I want to do but just don't know how, and seeing the amount of time and effort to get to the point of knowing how... it just is a mountain to climb. It intimidates me.”
I showed the above quote to my friend and co-worker Christopher Shankland, who has led engineering on major games for over a decade, and he chuckled. “That’s how it feels for everybody,” he said.
In other words: Xonk, you’re on the right track.
Suffering From Success
With astonishing images like the ones above filling up YouTube videos and social posts, the tight-knit Minecraft modding and shader community has felt more than a little overwhelmed with all the sudden attention that’s resulted.
Bliss developer Xonk says that when the latest surge of YouTube videos showcasing Distant Horizons running together with Bliss started appearing, he was delighted by the positive attention. But he soon felt the downsides when thousands of people started showing up in the Iris Project Discord server asking about how to use the mods and shaders together. At the moment, most of the necessary tech is still in alpha or beta form, and requires some technical savvy to get it all working together.
“So, so many people just couldn't figure it out, and were flooding in asking the same questions. Despite FAQs existing, they were asking literally thousands of times,” Xonk says. “The Discord support thread for Bliss in the Iris Project server went from like a few hundred messages to now 22 thousand.”
Iris Project Discord moderator “chalky” says that his server’s membership doubled. “We didn't expect it to be such a big deal to people,” chalky told me, “so now we have about 20k members with the testers role… [which] wasn't meant to happen.”
In the wake of the recent surge of interest, chalky and the other Iris Project Discord mods are trying to help people understand that these tools shouldn’t be treated as stable software, while also encouraging them to stick around and take part in the community if they’re interested. “Alas,” says chalky in a refrain any community manager would recognize, “people don't read.”
Even James Seibel, the creator of Distant Horizons, has been advising most Minecraft players to hold off on installing the custom mods and shaders required to match what some popular YouTubers have been showing off. “If you want to use DH and Iris shaders together, please wait until the next stable release of both mods,” Seibel wrote in a comment on a recent YouTube video. “There are bugs with both and the install process isn't for the faint of heart.”
Those warnings aside, Seibel tells me that his ambition is to eventually make Distant Horizons accessible for any Minecraft player. And his real dream—one he considers “unrealistic”—is to one day work with Mojang to get Distant Horizons added to the regular off-the-shelf version of Minecraft.
The mod, Seibel says, “has a license where Mojang could easily implement it.” Although he says he’d want to fix a number of issues with the mod first. But “working on Minecraft as a paid job would be pretty cool.”
If anybody from Microsoft is reading: maybe give this mod-man a call? Crazier things have happened in gaming—like a small indie game about playing with blocks getting bought for $2.5 billion by the world’s largest company.
At the end of the day, whether you’re playing Minecraft or modding it, the only real limit is your imagi— …yeah, you know what I’m saying.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go spend $4,000 on a graphics card so I can add ray tracing to Tetris.
See you next Friday.