// the take
Grasscutter is a from-scratch server reimplementation for Genshin Impact, covering combat, gacha, inventory, teleportation, and friends. It's for people who want to run a private, offline instance of the game or poke at how its network protocol works, not for anyone looking for a maintained live-service alternative — the project has effectively stopped chasing new game versions.
The scope is genuinely impressive: reverse-engineering a live-service game's entire binary network protocol into working Java classes (hundreds of message types under net/proto) is a lot of grunt work most reimplementation projects never finish. It has real CI — build, code-check, container, and i18n-lint workflows actually run on every push, which is more discipline than most fan projects bother with. The README is maintained in 15 languages, which says something about an active (if informal) contributor base.
Documentation is basically 'ask on Discord' — there's a wiki link and that's it; the README openly states versions past the last release get no support. The server is hard-pinned to one specific old client version (REL4.0.1) and the README is explicit that you cannot mix client/server versions, so it's frozen rather than evolving. The generated proto classes have meaningless auto-generated names (ACCKLIOPBHNOuterClass, AEHOGBMFIDKOuterClass, etc.) with no semantic mapping back to the original fields — anyone trying to extend or audit this code is on their own. And it's worth being upfront that this is a wholesale clone of a commercial live-service game's server, with the README itself linking to pirated client downloads — that's a real legal exposure for anyone running or distributing it, not just a code-quality footnote.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →