Decimation

Hello everyone new updates!!

The original mod talked to a server over raw TCP/UDP sockets (using a Java networking library called KryoNet) for things like player stats, the server list screen, and update checks. That backend was never open source and doesn’t exist anymore, so I’ve been writing a brand new one that speaks the exact same “language” the client expects matching its wire protocol message by message so the old client just works against new server code without needing to be rewritten itself.

So far that new server handles:

Player profiles (kills/deaths/stats)
The in game server list
Live player count

More message types (server-side crash reports, supporter status, the update system) are getting added one at a time as I work through them.

Networking infrastructure.

Got a relay set up so the client’s existing hardcoded connection info actually reaches the new server, DNS pointed at the right place, and both sides talking over the same ports without falling over which involved learning more about TCP vs UDP port binding and firewall/security groups than I expected to going in.

Fixed a pile of dead links. A handful of things the mod calls out to at runtime (update checks, a resource pack, some JSON it fetches for the main menu) pointed at old GitHub links that don’t exist anymore. Tracked those down one at a time and replaced them with working equivalents, including chasing down a sneaky “blocked because of the default Java user-agent” issue that looked like a permissions bug at first.

Hey everyone, It’s been a while but Decimation is alive again. I want to give you a real update on where things stand, because a lot has happened behind the scenes and I don’t want that work to go unnoticed. (and i have no clue why it logged only 46m over the +100 hours of work done but whatever.)

Where this started

Like some of you may know, development on Decimation stalled a long time ago and the original source code was never made public. For a long time that meant the mod was effectively frozen, no fixes, no updates, no working mod. Over the past weeks I’ve been working on reviving the project from the ground up: rebuilding a working development environment, restoring the codebase to a buildable state, and getting the whole thing running on modern tooling instead of the outdated setup it originally shipped with.

This has been a genuinely massive undertaking. We’re talking about thousands of individual issues that needed to be worked through one by one, some tiny, some structural, across a codebase that spans dozens of systems. It has not been a quick job, and there were several points where the smart move was to stop, rethink the approach, and redo work rather than push forward on a shaky foundation.

What’s been accomplished so far

• Full build pipeline rebuilt. The mod now compiles against a modern, actively maintained toolchain instead of infrastructure that had quietly rotted away over the years (dead package repositories, unsupported build tools, etc).
• The codebase itself has been restored to a compilable state. This included resolving a huge number of structural issues throughout the mod’s systems, core mechanics, networking, rendering, player data, UI, and more.
• First successful in-game boot. After all of the above, I’ve gotten Decimation to actually launch in a Minecraft client again for the first time.
• Cross-machine reliability. Ironing out environment specific quirks so the project builds consistently regardless of which machine it’s compiled on.

What’s next

The immediate focus now is functional testing, going system by system to confirm everything behaves the way it’s supposed to, catching runtime issues that don’t show up until you actually play the mod, and gradually cleaning up the codebase so future changes are easier to make than this initial recovery was.

I’m not going to promise a release date, because anyone who’s done a project like this knows those promises tend to age badly. What I can promise is that this isn’t a “one big push and abandon it again” situation, the goal is to get Decimation back to a state where it can actually be maintained and built upon going forward.