Vanilla parity

Basalt’s goal is to play the same as the official Bedrock Dedicated Server, version 1.26.60. Where it implements a mechanic, it uses vanilla’s rules and numbers: damage, drop tables, break times, growth odds, redstone delays. This page says what is implemented and, as plainly as possible, what is not.

Basalt is under active development, so the gaps shrink over time. If something you need is in the second half of this page, it does not work today.

What matches vanilla

World and blocks

• Breaking and placing with vanilla break times, tool requirements and drops.
• Liquids, falling blocks (sand, gravel, concrete powder, anvils, the dragon egg, pointed dripstone), and concrete powder hardening in water.
• Farming: hoes, seeds, crops, farmland, sugar cane, cactus, saplings and trees, bone meal.
• Fire and soul fire: spreading, burning blocks away, burning out, rain putting it out, lava lighting what burns, netherrack and magma burning forever. Flint and steel and fire charges.
• Weather on vanilla timers, and lightning in thunderstorms: strikes, fire, lightning rods, charged creepers and copper being scraped clean.
• Snow and ice in cold biomes: surface water freezes and snow layers pile up while it snows, up to the biome’s limit.
• Random-tick changes: leaf decay, ice and snow melting, copper weathering, grass and mycelium spreading.
• Flowers, grass, mushrooms and two-block plants break and drop when the block under them goes.
• Day and night, and beds: setting a spawn point, and skipping the night and clearing the weather once enough players sleep (playerssleepingpercentage).
• Block hazards: cactus, sweet berry bushes, magma, campfires, powder snow, suffocation and wither roses. Hay, slime, beds, honey and cobwebs soften or cancel falls.
• Signs and hanging signs (both sides, dyes, glow ink and wax), jukeboxes and bells.
• Composters, filled by hand, hoppers or droppers, and emptied for bone meal.
• Campfires and soul campfires, which cook up to four foods.
• Flower pots and decorated pots.
• Item frames and glow item frames: placing, turning and taking out the item.
• Paintings, which pick the largest design that fits.
• Structure blocks: saving and loading structures from the editor or with redstone.
• Chunks that load, save and unload as players move.

Items and containers

• Inventories, the creative inventory, item use, eating and drinking, bows and tridents.
• Crafting, furnaces, blast furnaces and smokers.
• Brewing stands, fuelled with blaze powder and brewing by vanilla’s recipes.
• Enchanting tables, anvils and grindstones, including Mending. Anvils rename, repair with materials, combine items and enchanted books, and wear down with use.
• Smithing tables, for netherite upgrades and armour trims.
• Stonecutters, with all of vanilla’s stonecutter recipes.
• Looms, for adding patterns to banners. Banners can also be put on shields.
• Chests and double chests, barrels and shulker boxes, which keep their contents when broken. Bundles, with vanilla’s weight rules.
• Fishing, with Lure, Luck of the Sea and vanilla’s fishing loot.
• Elytra, which wear while gliding, and firework rockets, which launch from a block or boost a gliding player.
• Experience orbs and levels.

Mobs and combat

• Cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, zombies, skeletons, spiders and creepers, driven by vanilla’s own entity definitions: health, speed, behaviours, baby animals that grow up, sheep colours, spiders that turn hostile in the dark.
• Shearing sheep, which grow their wool back by eating grass, and chickens laying eggs. A spawn egg used on a mob of the same kind makes a baby.
• Vanilla pathfinding, natural spawning by vanilla’s spawn rules for each biome, light level and mob caps, and vanilla loot tables including Looting.
• Melee and projectile damage, armour, shields, knockback, status effects, critical hits and the vanilla damage causes.
• Explosions that damage entities and break blocks.
• Minecarts and boats, including chest boats and bamboo rafts, and riding them.

Redstone

Wire, torches, repeaters, comparators, observers, pistons, hoppers, droppers, dispensers, crafters, rails and TNT all follow Bedrock’s rules. The details and the exceptions are on the Redstone page.

Game rules

These game rules take effect: dodaylightcycle, doweathercycle, dofiretick, randomtickspeed, dotiledrops, doentitydrops, domobloot, domobspawning, mobgriefing, drowningdamage, falldamage, firedamage, freezedamage, naturalregeneration, pvp, keepinventory, doimmediaterespawn, playerssleepingpercentage, showdeathmessages, showcoordinates, spawnradius, sendcommandfeedback, projectilescanbreakblocks, tntexplodes and tntexplosiondropdecay.

The other vanilla game rules are stored, shown by /gamerule and saved with the world, but may not change anything yet.

Players and multiplayer

• Xbox sign-in verification, operators and permission levels, the allowlist and bans.
• Chat with join and leave messages, scoreboards shown in the sidebar, player list and below names.
• Hunger, health, natural regeneration, respawning and death messages.
• Skins, including in-game skin changes, and emotes.

Known gaps

Dimensions and terrain

• No Nether and no End. Basalt runs one overworld.
• No generated structures. New chunks come from a port of the vanilla overworld generator, with its caves, ores, trees and other features, but villages, mineshafts, strongholds, temples and other structures are not generated. Water and lava springs in new terrain do not flow until a block next to them changes. Chunks that a vanilla world already saved load exactly as they were; only chunks nobody had visited are generated by Basalt.
• No seed setting. A new world gets a random seed.

Tip

For the most faithful terrain, generate the area you want to play in with vanilla first, then copy the world into Basalt. See Worlds.

Mobs

• Only eight mobs. The mobs listed above are the ones implemented. Every other vanilla mob is missing, which also means no villagers and no trading.
• No breeding or taming. Animals cannot be fed into love mode; the only way to get a baby is a spawn egg.
• Cows cannot be milked, and pigs cannot be saddled and ridden.
• Custom mobs from addons cannot be ridden, bred or tamed, and do not spawn naturally. See Addons.

Blocks and items

• No custom blocks from addons.
• Beacons, armour stands, lecterns and chiseled bookshelves are not implemented.
• Cauldrons cannot be filled or used. Rain does not fill them either.
• Cartography tables open, but maps are not drawn, and maps cannot be copied, extended or locked.
• Crafting recipes that vanilla works out in code cannot be made, except putting a banner on a shield and repairing two worn items together. Crafters cannot make them either.
• Beds do not check for monsters nearby before letting you sleep.
• Boats do not take lava damage or pick up mobs.
• Vines do not grow.
• If a block or item is not listed under “What matches vanilla” above, do not rely on it.
• Daylight sensors do not follow the sun, and sculk sensors and lecterns have no redstone behaviour. See Redstone.

Commands

• Basalt has 42 commands, far fewer than vanilla. There is no /fill, /setblock, /execute or /function, for example.
• /gamemode changes only your own game mode.
• Most selectors only pick players. /kill is the exception.
• /scoreboard has dummy objectives only, with no teams.
• /give reports the item’s identifier rather than its translated name.

The full list is on the Commands page.

Scripting

Basalt implements a large part of @minecraft/server, but not all of it. What is missing or different is listed in Differences from BDS.

Deliberate differences

A few things differ from BDS on purpose:

• Anti-cheat. Basalt refuses actions vanilla would accept from a modified client, such as hits through walls. See Anti-cheat.
• Bans. BDS has no ban list; Basalt adds /ban, /ban-ip and their pardons.
• Rate limits. Clients that flood packets, commands or chat are throttled or disconnected.
• Extra plugin features. The Plugin API adds things BDS does not have, such as container menus, boss bars, WebSockets and extra events.
• Optional enchantment limits. enchant_bypass_limits lets operators and plugins exceed vanilla’s enchantment levels. It is off by default.

Reporting a difference

If Basalt behaves differently from vanilla in something this page says is supported, that is a bug. Note the block, item or mob involved, what vanilla does, what Basalt does, and how to reproduce it.