Voxel Roadmap - 2025
Voxel - November 2, 2024
I’m very excited to present what I have planned for Voxel in 2025 and beyond. Let’s take a tour of 2024 and 2025 to discover Voxel’s objectives and the year ahead.
First, a quick announcement: content updates for Yggdrasil 2.0.0 and NeoEnchant 5.7.0 will be available next week, including eight new enchantments, reworks, balancing, and performance improvements.
Additionally, two new structures: “The Asflors Village” and “The Runic Fracture”, as well as an “Alfheim” variant: “The Dark Alfheim”. This update includes a deep storyline, balancing, and unique items.
Voxel was initially created to provide resources for programming, Java, modding, shaders, resource packs, and datapacks, while deepening the understanding of how Minecraft works.
Voxel has shifted course and evolved into a platform providing a Minecraft content customization experience, notably through its datapack configurator.
This configurator was initially intended to modify enchantments of any Minecraft datapack, and it has undergone several evolutions throughout the year.
After massive usage, I decided to proceed with an internal rewrite. The goal was to transform the project into an engine capable of creating multiple types of configurators for any type of Minecraft content.
Shortly after, a second rewrite phase was undertaken. The goal this time was to be able to load the configurator from a simple data file. This feature isn’t yet exploited, but it will have a significant impact in the future, allowing the use of multiple contents simultaneously.
A few months later, the configurator was extended to support Minecraft mods, whether Forge, NeoForge, Quilt, or Fabric, an important milestone.
And for the end of this year, the configurator recently received huge internal evolutions, notably the export of part of the code as JavaScript dependencies, but that’s too technical to discuss here. I’ll write a dedicated article about the configurator’s internal workings.
Voxel Studio is under development and will address various needs. Thanks to a Visual Scripting interface, it allows creating and manipulating datapacks without any code. Inspired by powerful tools such as Unity, Unreal Engine, and Blender, Voxel Studio offers simple, intuitive, and visual control of your creations.
For users: These tools will be integrated into the configurator to manage complex elements, like enchantment effects (balancing, adding new effects, etc.)
For developers, this will allow you to manage your datapacks, facilitating faster, more efficient, and better-organized work.
Voxelia is a project intended for the configurator and studio. It will integrate artificial intelligence features. From a simple text prompt, you’ll be able to modify balancing and create content. It will offer suggestions, all while staying within the configurator and studio environment.
Concrete example of my vision for Voxelia:
Moreover, thanks to the previously mentioned “content validation,” it theoretically won’t be able to suggest things that don’t exist and will ensure your content loads correctly in Minecraft without possible errors. In case of errors, the AI will understand the errors sent and apply solutions automatically in the background.
This will be the central point of 2025. I wish to extend the configurator to more content.
I plan to develop everything related to world generation, including biomes, structures, dimensions, and trials spawners. Specifically:
I remain responsive to snapshots. If Minecraft undertakes to add custom items or custom potion effects for 1.21.4…, or 1.22, this content will become my priority and will be supported in the configurator as soon as possible.
What about other datapack features, that is, the following elements:
These elements are simpler to integrate and will be supported in parallel in the configurator, without being priorities. Some, like predicates and item modifiers, won’t be directly configurable to preserve intuitive and simplified use. These technical features will work in the background without requiring your intervention.
And one last piece of information: thanks to the configurator’s redesign, and as it can now load from a data file, datapacks/mods will be able to directly include a configurator in their datapacks/mods. This will allow creating custom configurators specific to their content.
Here are some examples:
Here, I’ll present other projects I have in mind for Voxel, two of which are already under development but are technical projects.
This project wasn’t initially planned, but thanks to recent developments and new dependencies in development, this functionality will be simple and quick to implement. The goal is to allow converting datapacks from one Minecraft version to another without loss of functionality. Misode already offers this service on their site, and I wish to develop it as well and integrate it into my internal tools. This functionality will be used for the configurator as well as for future projects like Voxel Studio, facilitating transition between different Minecraft versions.
Content validation is an intelligent system that analyzes your datapacks and mods in the background to automatically detect potential errors. Errors are automatically corrected in the background.
This is just at the idea stage, but this project is close to my heart. It will allow obtaining “Voxel Studio,” “Voxelia,” and the configurator in a desktop application, intended for players but also developers.
This version will be able to directly find the location of your datapacks/mods, a significant time saver.
For developers, the interest is being able to continue using your favorite code editor and having Voxel in parallel to manage your datapacks/mods like with Unity. You can modify your scripts and see changes in real-time in the application.
Voxel is a recent project, and I won’t hide that means of living from it are non-existent, but despite everything, I love what I do and what we’ve been able to bring to the Minecraft ecosystem.
I wish to integrate a way to live from this project, but I haven’t yet found the ideal way. What’s planned is to continue exclusivities on Patreon, but also to include Adsense, but not in an intrusive way. I wish to have a balance like Modrinth has achieved.
So, that’s Voxel for 2024 and 2025. I’m very happy to present all this to you and I can’t wait to show you all these features. If you have any questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to share them with me. Thank you for reading and see you soon on Voxel.
