// the find
feather-rs/feather
A Minecraft server implementation in Rust
Feather is an alternative Minecraft server implementation in Rust, targeting 1.16.5. It uses an ECS architecture and a WebAssembly-sandboxed plugin API (Quill). The project is explicitly inactive — the README points you to the successor project valence instead.
The ECS design is a genuine architectural improvement over Bukkit/Paper's tangled object graph — systems are composable and the data layout is cache-friendly. The WASM plugin sandbox is a smart call: plugins can't crash the server process or leak memory into the host. Performance numbers (1M entities, 500 concurrent players) are plausible given the EF-free entity model, even if incomplete feature coverage flatters them. The libcraft/quill split is clean — protocol and game logic are separated from server concerns, which would make the library crates reusable.
It's abandoned — the maintainers themselves say so in the README and direct you elsewhere. Only supports 1.16.5; Minecraft has had several major protocol versions since, so this is a historical artifact, not a usable server. Survival gameplay is largely unimplemented: no mob AI, no redstone, no crafting — the entity files under feather/common/src/entities are mostly empty structs. The old/ directory sitting in the repo is a large block of dead code with its own separate crate graph, which signals the codebase went through at least one significant rewrite without cleanup.