BeePack

A custom Minecraft client, in the same category as Lunar Client and Badlion: the game, repackaged with the things competitive players want, in one launcher instead of a folder of mods each person assembles themselves.

Mine was much smaller than either and lasted one year.

why this is the kind of thing a teenager builds#

Minecraft clients are an unusually good first serious project, and I don't think that's an accident.

The target already exists, so there's no product design to get stuck on — the brief is "like the game, but with these things", and you can tell instantly whether it works. It's also a codebase you didn't write and can't change, which means the work is reading unfamiliar Java and figuring out where to intervene. That's a genuinely different skill from writing something from scratch, and it's the one that turned out to transfer.

It's also where the Java went in. Everything I did before TypeScript was on the JVM, and this is the project that made that true rather than a class requirement.

why it was only 2021#

Nothing happened to it. It didn't get shut down and it didn't break.

It was a 2021 project and I stopped being a person who spent their evenings on a Minecraft client. The scene it existed for moves fast, an unmaintained client is worse than no client, and I'd already gotten the part I actually wanted out of it — which was learning how to work inside a large codebase somebody else wrote.

It's listed here because it's where a lot of the Java came from, and the obfuscator that grew out of it — started the same year — is the direct continuation.