// the take
Craft is a minimalist Minecraft clone in a few thousand lines of C, using modern shader-based OpenGL and sqlite for world persistence, with a Python-companion server for multiplayer. It's for C/graphics programmers who want a small, readable codebase to study voxel rendering, chunking, and basic networking rather than a production game engine.
The rendering pipeline is a genuinely good teaching example: only exposed block faces are drawn, chunks are frustum-culled, and ambient occlusion is implemented per the referenced 0fps algorithm — all in readable, dependency-light C. The multiplayer protocol is dead simple (ASCII line-based commands like C,p,q,key and B,p,q,x,y,z,w) which makes it easy to trace exactly what goes over the wire. World persistence only stores deltas against procedurally-generated terrain, so the sqlite file stays small and loading is fast.
Last push was April 2024 and the author's own hosted multiplayer server (craft.michaelfogleman.com) is dead, so the multiplayer feature as documented no longer works out of the box — you have to stand up your own Python server plus compile a separate DLL for terrain generation, which is a rough first-run experience. The build story is dated: CMake + MinGW + manually placing cURL in Program Files on Windows, vendored deps (GLEW, GLFW, sqlite3 amalgamation) checked into the repo instead of fetched, no CI, and no tests. Floating-point precision breaks down at large X/Z chunk coordinates, which is a known, unresolved limitation of the "infinite world" design.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →