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Pumpkin-MC/Pumpkin
Empowering everyone to host fast and efficient Minecraft servers.
Pumpkin is a from-scratch Minecraft server implementation in Rust, targeting both Java and Bedrock clients from a single binary. It's aimed at server operators who want better throughput than the JVM-based alternatives (Paper, Purpur) and are willing to trade ecosystem maturity for performance. Pre-1.0, actively developed, not production-ready.
The codegen pipeline (pumpkin-codegen) that bakes Minecraft's JSON game data into generated Rust types at build time is the right call — version bumps become a data update, not a manual audit of protocol constants. Multi-version support via bundled ViaBackwards NBT mappings is real and current, covering 1.20.5 through 1.21.11 and Bedrock 26.x. The workspace layout is clean: protocol, config, data, and world logic are separated into distinct crates rather than one monolith. The WIT plugin interface hints at WASM-based plugins, which would let plugin authors use any language — if it ships, that's a bigger deal than the headline performance story.
Redstone doesn't exist yet, which rules out the majority of survival and technical Minecraft use cases — it's not a minor gap. Chunk generation is also missing, so you're loading existing worlds only; you cannot create a fresh server world. The plugin API is listed as a tracking issue, not a shipped feature, so anyone building on this today has no stable surface to target. GPL v3 is a real constraint: plugins that link against the server may be forced open-source, which will limit adoption in the same commercial plugin market that made the Java ecosystem viable.