FalloutCraft

FalloutCraft

Play Fallout 4 as a Minecraft player. A Fallout 4 + Minecraft crossover mod: Minecraft's movement, inventory, building, hearts and combat inside the Commonwealth.

Walk, sprint and jump through Sanctuary with Minecraft's physics. Build a base out of Minecraft blocks on top of Red Rocket. Fight raiders, mole rats and bloodbugs with a diamond sword, a bow and a shield, while your Fallout S.P.E.C.I.A.L. makes Steve faster, stronger or tougher. Open the Pip-Boy and listen to Diamond City Radio while you do it.

Neither game is rewritten. Minecraft runs its own game logic, and Fallout 4 runs its world, NPCs, quests, Pip-Boy and saves. A Fallout 4 F4SE plugin and a Minecraft Fabric mod talk to each other through shared memory. Minecraft runs hidden in the background, and Fallout draws everything.

Latest: v0.1.2 — Scavenging & Gathering: Minecraft loot in Fallout's containers and corpses, chop trees and dig the ground for resources, and NPCs now bump into your builds.

FalloutCraft is built on SkyCraft by chasmlol, the Skyrim + Minecraft mod (see Credits).

Status: early and experimental. Expect rough edges, and back up your saves. This is a fan project. It isn't affiliated with Mojang, Microsoft, Bethesda or ZeniMax, and you need to own both games.

What works

• Movement: Minecraft movement on Fallout's terrain, roads and buildings: walking,

  sprinting, jumping, crouching, swimming and falling. Fallout's collision (Havok) is streamed into Minecraft's own collision, and Fallout's ground under your feet is double-checked every frame so you don't fall through cracked roads.

• Blocks: place and break blocks anywhere in the Commonwealth. They're drawn inside Fallout's

  frame and hide behind Fallout's walls. Dropped items, arrows and block-breaking cracks are drawn too.

• Combat: hit Fallout's NPCs and creatures with any Minecraft weapon, including bows and

  tridents. Damage is scaled to the enemy's level. Enemies fight back, stagger on critical and knockback hits, and your kills count as yours.

• Health: Minecraft's hearts are your health. Fallout's damage (melee, bullets, bleeding) is

  sent to Minecraft, Minecraft's armour and shield reduce it, eating and natural regeneration heal you, and Fallout's health bar follows Minecraft's. If you die in Minecraft, you die in Fallout.

• S.P.E.C.I.A.L.: your Fallout stats shape your Minecraft body (5 is average; above is a

  bonus, below a penalty):

• Pip-Boy: Tab opens the Pip-Boy as usual, radio included.
• Camera: Minecraft's F5 camera modes (behind and in front) show your Minecraft skin and

  armour in Fallout. Fallout's own first-person arms are hidden.

• Interiors: every interior and every other worldspace gets its own place in the Minecraft

  world, so what you build in one never shows up in another. Interior walls, floors and doors line up with Fallout's own (fixed in v0.1.1).

• Minecraft nights: Minecraft's clock follows Fallout's. From 20:00 to 5:00, zombies,

  skeletons and creepers show up around you outdoors, alongside the Wasteland's own mutants. Zombies and skeletons burn at dawn, and creepers blow holes in the ground.

• Scavenging: the first time you open a container (a desk, a toolbox, a fridge...) or search

  a corpse, you also find a little everyday Minecraft loot: sticks, coal, iron nuggets, paper, string, torches, bread, bones, arrows, leather, saplings and seeds... ("Found! ..." in the chat).

• Gathering: mine the world like in Minecraft. Chop a tree and it falls out of Fallout's world,

  giving you logs and often a sapling; small rocks give stone; dig the Wasteland's ground for dirt, then about a dozen layers of stone with ores (coal, iron, copper, redstone, gold, lapis, the rare diamond) before bedrock. You can climb down into the holes you dig.

• NPCs vs your builds: the blocks you place are solid for Fallout too, so NPCs and creatures

  bump into your walls instead of walking through them. (They still plan their routes as if the blocks weren't there.)

Requirements

Fallout 4

Recommended: play from a save made after you leave Vault 111. The opening (the pre-war house and the vault) is heavily scripted and may not work while Minecraft drives the player.

Minecraft

Minecraft runs hidden next to Fallout. Budget about 3 GB of extra RAM and a GPU that runs Minecraft 26.3.

To play you also need JDK 25 (it runs the Minecraft mod) and Git (or download this repo as a ZIP from GitHub).

To build the plugin yourself (optional: a compiled one comes with the repo):

Installing

Quick install (from Releases)

No Git or build tools needed. Grab the files from the latest release:

1. Install F4SE and the Address Library (see Fallout 4 mods below).
2. Install FalloutCraft--FO4.zip with Mod Organizer 2 / Vortex (*Install mod from

   archive*), or copy commonlibf4-template.dll into Fallout 4\Data\F4SE\Plugins\.

3. In your Minecraft launcher (Prism Launcher, MultiMC, official) make a **Minecraft 26.3 + Fabric

   Loader 0.19.5** instance running Java 25, and put Fabric API 0.161.0+26.3 and falloutcraft-.jar in its mods folder.

4. Start that Minecraft instance first (its window hides and it waits for Fallout), then start

   Fallout 4 through F4SE and load a save.

Full install (from the repo)

The repo comes with the plugin already compiled, so you don't need to build anything to play. (If you'd rather build it yourself, see Building from source.)

1. Fallout 4 mods

Install these first, with your mod manager (Mod Organizer 2, Vortex) or by hand:

1. F4SE: copy f4se_loader.exe, the f4se_1_*.dll files and the Data folder from the F4SE

   archive into your Fallout 4 folder (where Fallout4.exe is). From now on, start the game with f4se_loader.exe (or through your mod manager).

2. Address Library for F4SE Plugins: its .bin file goes into

   Fallout 4\Data\F4SE\Plugins\.

2. Get FalloutCraft

git clone https://github.com/zeyvu/FalloutCraft

(or Code > Download ZIP on GitHub and unzip it).

3. Install the plugin

Copy FO4_Release\Data\F4SE\Plugins\commonlibf4-template.dll into Fallout 4\Data\F4SE\Plugins\ (next to the Address Library's .bin). That's the FalloutCraft plugin; F4SE loads it when the game starts.

With Mod Organizer 2 or Vortex: zip the FO4_Release\Data folder (so the zip has Data at its top) and install the zip as a mod.

4. Start Minecraft

cd FalloutCraft\fabric
gradlew runClient

That builds the FalloutCraft Minecraft mod and starts Minecraft with it. The first run downloads Minecraft 26.3, Fabric and the Fabric API (a few minutes). Minecraft hides its window and waits for Fallout. Leave it running.

5. Play

1. With Minecraft running, start Fallout 4 through F4SE (f4se_loader.exe or your mod

   manager) and load a save.

2. The two find each other on their own: Minecraft opens its FalloutCraft world, moves to where

   your Fallout character stands, and takes over. You'll see Minecraft's hotbar and hearts over Fallout.

The order doesn't matter, and either side can be restarted: they reconnect.

To check the plugin loaded, open Documents\My Games\Fallout4\F4SE\commonlibf4-template.log: it starts with SkyCraft (FalloutCraft) plugin build.

Updating

git pull (or download the ZIP again), copy the new commonlibf4-template.dll over the old one, and start Minecraft again with gradlew runClient (it rebuilds the mod). Update both halves together: they share a memory layout and only talk to a matching version.

Uninstalling

Delete Fallout 4\Data\F4SE\Plugins\commonlibf4-template.dll. FalloutCraft doesn't change your Fallout saves beyond what you did while playing.

Controls

Minecraft has priority. These keys still go to Fallout:

And these are Minecraft's, moved or changed for Fallout:

Every other key is Minecraft's: F5 camera, T chat, / commands, the hotbar keys, the mouse buttons and so on.

Known limitations

• If something goes wrong, the logs say what:
  • Documents\My Games\Fallout4\F4SE\commonlibf4-template.log (the Fallout plugin)
  • Documents\My Games\Fallout4\F4SE\SkyCraft_crash.log (crashes, with function names)
  • fabric\run\logs\latest.log (Minecraft)
• Some cracked or uneven ground (Concord's broken roads, rubble) can still make the player stumble

  for a moment.

• Fallout's inventory and perk screens open through the Pip-Boy; Fallout's weapons and VATS can't

  be used while Minecraft drives the player.

• Fallout's stimpaks and food don't heal Minecraft's hearts yet; eat Minecraft food.
• Charisma and Intelligence don't change anything in Minecraft yet.
• Not ported from SkyCraft yet: digging into the world itself, Minecraft lights lighting Fallout,

  Minecraft water, NPCs walking around blocks, training Fallout skills from Minecraft play, and multiplayer.

• FalloutCraft_worlds.txt (next to the logs) remembers where each interior lives in the

  Minecraft world. Deleting it moves interiors around, and what you built inside them won't show up in the same place.

• Mods that also take over the player's camera or movement will conflict.

Building from source

Only needed if you change the plugin or want to compile it yourself.

The plugin is built on the CommonLibF4 plugin template. The template is a separate project with its own license, so this repo doesn't include it: FO4_ModFiles/ has only FalloutCraft's own files. You clone the template, drop them in, and build. With XSE_FO4_GAME_PATH set, the build also copies the plugin straight into the game.

In a terminal (cmd), inside the FalloutCraft folder:

:: the CommonLibF4 template (with its submodules), inside the FalloutCraft folder
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/libxse/commonlibf4-template

:: FalloutCraft's sources into the template's src\, and its build file over the template's
copy /Y FO4_ModFiles\*.cpp commonlibf4-template\src\
copy /Y FO4_ModFiles\*.h commonlibf4-template\src\
copy /Y FO4_ModFiles\xmake.lua commonlibf4-template\xmake.lua

:: your Fallout 4 folder (the one with Fallout4.exe), so the build installs into it
setx XSE_FO4_GAME_PATH "C:\Games\Fallout 4"

FO4_ModFiles\xmake.lua is the template's build file plus the Direct3D and DbgHelp libraries the plugin needs (without them it doesn't link) and a .pdb for the crash log.

Close the terminal and open a new one (so it sees XSE_FO4_GAME_PATH), then:

cd FalloutCraft\commonlibf4-template
xmake build -r

The first build downloads CommonLibF4's dependencies and takes a few minutes. It ends with:

installing commonlibf4-template to C:\Games\Fallout 4\Data ..
install ok!
[100%]: build ok

That built commonlibf4-template.dll in commonlibf4-template\build\windows\x64\release\ and copied it to Fallout 4\Data\F4SE\Plugins\. Without XSE_FO4_GAME_PATH, copy it there yourself (the .pdb next to it is optional; it lets the crash log name functions). To update the compiled copy in the repo, copy it to FO4_Release\Data\F4SE\Plugins\.

The commonlibf4-template folder is ignored by Git: only FalloutCraft's own files are in this repo.

For development:

• fabric\gradlew runClient starts a dev Minecraft that stays running when Fallout closes;

  gradlew build builds the mod's .jar into fabric\build\libs\.

• docs\DESIGN.md explains how the two halves fit together (written for SkyCraft), and

  protocol\skycraft_protocol.h is the shared-memory layout both sides follow (FO4_ModFiles\skycraft_protocol.h is the same file).

Credits

FalloutCraft stands on SkyCraft by chasmlol, which brought Minecraft into Skyrim. Go and see it.

• From SkyCraft: the idea, the two-games-over-shared-memory design, the shared-memory protocol

  and the Minecraft Fabric mod. SkyCraft's original README is kept as READMEOriginal.md.

• New in FalloutCraft: the whole Fallout 4 F4SE plugin (FO4_ModFiles/): driving Fallout's

  player, streaming Fallout 4's Havok collision, drawing Minecraft's blocks, items and HUD in Fallout's renderer, the Pip-Boy hand-over, the F5 cameras, combat with Fallout's actors, separate interiors and worldspaces. In the Minecraft mod: Fallout's ground as a safety net under the player, health shared with Fallout, S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes, and armour and shields against Fallout's gunfire.

License

MIT