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 Horizon

Minecraft: Java Edition 26.3, rewritten in Rust. Your worlds, the same rules and the same terrain as the Java game, checked against it by hundreds of differential tests, in one native program with no Java. Free, open source (MIT) and unofficial: you play it with your own copy of Java Edition.


  


 What works today

Everything below is in the current release.

- The game. Survival, creative, hardcore and spectator; vanilla world generation in all three dimensions, mobs, villagers, raids, redstone, every command, the HUD and the recipe book. Vanilla saves open as they are, and worlds from 1.8 to 26.2 are upgraded.
- Multiplayer. Join vanilla and Horizon servers (online mode included), open a world to LAN, or invite friends with a code from the launcher's Home page.
- Graphics. Distant terrain up to 1,024 chunks, graphics presets, HDR and controllers, all off by default where they would change the vanilla look (settings).
- Packs. Resource packs, data packs and shader packs (below).
- Mods. Content mods and native Rust mods, installed from the launcher (below).
- Servers. Host one from the launcher, or run horizon-server on a VPS (below).
- The launcher. It installs and updates the game, prepares its files from your copy of Minecraft, and updates itself.


  
    
    
  
  
    
    
  


Nightly 2026-11-05 on a Mac mini (Apple M4 Pro, Metal): vanilla's textures, no mods or shader packs, render distance 32 with distant terrain on.

 Performance

Horizon draws more frames per second than Java Edition, and loads faster, on the same machine, world and path. tools/perf_bench.py runs each game in turn, from a fresh world (seed 1234), waiting for the terrain and then flying it over a village, a forest, an ocean and a mountain. Measured on 2026-10-29/30 on an idle Windows 11 machine (Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5080), Horizon v0.2.97 as the launcher installs it, 1280x720 in a window, VSync off, three games per figure. Frames per second, mean of the four scenes, with the slowest 1% of frames in brackets:

| Render distance | Horizon v0.2.97 | Vanilla 26.3 | Vanilla + mods |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 8 chunks | 3,289 (1,327) | 2,437 (640) | 2,375 (709) |
| 16 chunks | 2,074 (598) | 1,661 (375) | 1,586 (432) |
| 32 chunks | 1,207 (333) | 1,031 (176) | 879 (264) |

"Vanilla + mods" is Sodium, Lithium, FerriteCore and ImmediatelyFast. Horizon reaches the title screen in 2.9–3.2 s against vanilla's 7.5–7.7 s (the modded client's 10.8–11.1 s), loads a scene's chunks 2.9–3.8 times faster, and playing holds a steady working set of 1.1–1.7 GB against 1.9–2.9 GB. Every scene with its confidence interval and the run's load log: the 2026-10-29 reports. Method, and how to measure your own machine: docs/benchmark.md. playhorizon.dev/benchmarks puts these runs beside a 2016 laptop, a Mac mini and a gaming desktop.

 Download

Get the Horizon launcher from playhorizon.dev, or from the l

Top issues

Latest release

Outdated. Horizon now ships as the Nightly release (built from main every few hours): get it through the launcher at https://playhorizon.dev or from the Nightly release. GitHub keeps calling this one "Latest" only because Nightly is a pre-release.

Want to play? Download the Horizon launcher, not the files belowIt installs this version and keeps it up to date. It is also on GitHub: the launcher releases. You need your own copy of Minecraft: Java Edition. The files below are what the launcher installs, and the dedicated server for people who host one.

 Fixed
- item pickup: a stack in the off h