I wanted to share some of the journey of what it took to convert Minecraft saves to Brickadia. Its been six years of on and off development (mostly off).
If you just want to use the tool now, you can visit the website here
The first version was actually just done as a test for brs-java, which was a Java library for working with .brs files. That's Brickadia's original save file format before we got .brz Prefabs and .brdb worlds. I was making a Java library since it was my first programming language and it was where I felt comfortable and had fun. For some reason I really like converting stuff to brick game.
https://github.com/brickadia-community/brs-java
I didn't even have to make my own Minecraft world reader since there was already one available in Java at the time that worked pretty well.
https://github.com/Querz/NBT
Unfortunately I didn't update the repository with the latest and greatest conversions so its left in an earlier state.
One of the first conversions from Minecraft to Brickadia, using brs-java (Dec 2020)
attempt at getting colors of foliage more accurate, before biome blending was implemented
blocks were recreated by hand in code, an extremely tedious an inefficient process
just some of the code for building a furnace block
After graduating from university, I was going in to my first real job doing programming for a cloud company. I was told the team uses golang, so I set out to learn Go by remaking mc2brs in the language and making improvements to it.
https://github.com/Kmschr/mc2brs/tree/main
I learned that Minecraft's file format is actually pretty accessible and well documented throughout its history. Pretty much everything you would need to know is in these three pages:
https://minecraft.wiki/w/NBT_format
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Region_file_format
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Chunk_format
go version of mc2brs. I actually figured out color blending! I decompiled Minecraft to figure out how it works, 2021
In 2025 I was unemployed for a while after being laid off. During that time I decided to pick up the project again, but I thought it would be super cool to do it in Rust and to try to optimize the heck out of everything. Not that it really mattered, who cares if it takes 2 seconds vs 10 seconds to convert your Minecraft world, but to me this was an interesting goal and a way to continue programming skills while I need to find employment. I never ended up releasing this version, but the saves I made with it actually got featured in a Hermitcraft livestream when Brickadia had sponsored some of them to try out the game. This was super cool to me because at the time I was watching the Youtube series of a Hermitcraft called Docm.
That's all I feel like writing for now, but I'd love to expand on some of the challenges to doing the converter in a later followup.
