HaloCraft

HaloCraft

Minecraft inside Halo: Combat Evolved. Build, mine, craft and fight on Halo's levels with real Minecraft mechanics, drawn by Halo itself.

This isn't an overlay. Real Minecraft Java runs hidden in the background, a mod inside Halo talks to it through shared memory, and Halo renders everything: Minecraft's hand, HUD and inventory in Halo's frame, and Minecraft's blocks, items, mobs and Steve's body in Halo's world, through Halo's own camera and hidden behind Halo's walls. HaloCraft is a port of SkyCraft (Minecraft in Skyrim) to Halo CE.

Early and experimental. Everything below works and was played live, but expect rough edges.

Features

Building and mining

• Place and break blocks anywhere on Halo's levels, with Minecraft's cracks, outline, drops and pickup.
• Mine Halo's own terrain a block at a time, or blow craters in it with TNT. Each block drops what

  it's made of: dirt gives grass, sand gives sand, rock gives stone, Forerunner and human metal give iron, wood gives planks. Under the surface is dirt, then stone with ores, then bedrock.

Combat

• Minecraft weapons hurt Halo's Covenant and Flood. Hits land as Halo melee hits (flinches, shield

  flares, knockback). A Grunt falls to two sword hits, an Elite to three or four.

• Jump crits are real (and land like headshots). Bows shoot dead straight and drawing one zooms

  like Halo's sniper scope.

• Halo's damage to Chief becomes Minecraft damage, and if Steve dies, Chief dies.
• Minecraft's mobs join in: zombies, skeletons and creepers attack Halo's characters, iron golems

  defend you against the Covenant.

Minecraft, in Halo

• Minecraft's HUD, inventory, crafting, chat and commands, inside Halo's frame.
• Minecraft movement (walk, sprint, jump, sneak, swim) on Halo's level geometry. Chief follows

  Steve and Halo's camera sits at Steve's eye.

• Third person with F5: Steve's animated body, armour and held items.
• Every level load starts fresh: an empty patch of the Minecraft world and a starter kit (sword,

  tools, building blocks).

Download and play

You need Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Steam with Halo: CE installed, and a Microsoft account that owns Minecraft: Java Edition.

1. Download HaloCraft-.zip from the

   latest release and unzip it anywhere.

2. Double-click HaloCraft.exe. It starts the Minecraft that plays inside Halo (hidden), starts

   MCC through Steam with anti-cheat disabled, and loads HaloCraft into it.

3. Pick any Halo CE level: a campaign mission or a local custom game.

The first time, a Prism Launcher window asks you to sign in to Minecraft and then downloads Minecraft and Java (a few minutes). After that it's one click. Minecraft quits by itself when you quit Halo, and if anything didn't start, run HaloCraft.exe again: it only starts what's missing.

Controls

How it works

flowchart LR
    subgraph MC["Minecraft Java (hidden window)"]
        F["Fabric mod  
physics, inventory, blocks,  
mobs, combat rules"]
    end
    subgraph H["Halo CE (MCC)"]
        S["Spark  
mod loader"] --> D["halocraft.dll  
camera, input, collision,  
rendering, damage"]
    end
    F <-->|"shared memory  
player state, input, level collision,  
meshes, hits and events"| D

• Halo to Minecraft: Halo's level collision (its BSP, with each surface's material), the

  camera, your input, and every nearby Halo character, mirrored in Minecraft as an invisible stand-in that Minecraft's weapons and mobs can hit.

• Minecraft to Halo: where Steve is (Chief follows), Minecraft's frame for the HUD and

  screens, block meshes, entities and particles, which Halo draws with its own view-projection and depth buffer, and every hit, which goes through Halo's own damage code.

Known limitations

• The Covenant don't shoot back at Minecraft's mobs yet (mobs hurt them, they ignore the mobs).
• Vehicles and cutscenes: Halo takes back control of Chief while you're in a vehicle.
• Blocks are always lit like daytime; Halo's lighting doesn't reach them yet.
• Halo's bullets and AI don't see Minecraft blocks, so walls you build aren't cover.

Building from source

You need Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools (C++), Premake 5 and JDK 25.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/festella22/halocraft
cd halocraft
$env:JAVA_HOME = ""
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools\package.ps1

That builds everything into dist\HaloCraft (ready to run) and dist\HaloCraft-.zip.

For development: cd fabric; .\gradlew runClient starts Minecraft with a dev account, tools\halo_dev.ps1 installs the mod, starts MCC and injects Spark, and tools\halo_reload.ps1 rebuilds and hot-reloads the Halo side while MCC keeps running.

More on the design SkyCraft and HaloCraft share: docs/SKYCRAFT.md and docs/DESIGN.md.

Credits

• SkyCraft by chasmlol (MIT): the two-games design, the

  Minecraft mod, and the code the Halo side's link, compositor, collision voxelizer, digging and entity geometry are ported from.

• Spark by KodyJKing: the Halo CE MCC mod loader and SDK

  HaloCraft runs on.

• Prism Launcher (GPL-3.0), bundled to sign in to and start Minecraft.
• Inspired by the Minecraft-in-Elden-Ring mod.

See THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md for licenses.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Spark and Prism Launcher come under their own terms.

HaloCraft is a fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Mojang, Microsoft, 343 Industries, Halo Studios or Bungie. You need to own both games.