You might remember PumpkinMC, the custom Minecraft server software built entirely from scratch in Rust. After more than 2 years (28 months) of non-stop work, the time has finally come: the PumpkinMC Beta is officially live!

While many ambitious custom server projects lose momentum over time, PumpkinMC stands as the only project in this space to receive continuous, active updates across such a long timeframe.

Scope of the 1.0 Release

I want to clarify the primary goal for this first official release: making the game fully beatable from start to end.

A 1:1 vanilla world generator was not the prerequisite for 1.0, though achieving full parity remains our ultimate target. We actually reached the "beatable game" milestone a long time ago, but chose to spend extra months packing in features, hardening stability, and squashing bugs.

To anyone feeling this release is coming too early: it has been in active development for over 28 months. Following this launch, frequent updates will continue rolling out to bring true 1:1 vanilla world generation, deeper parity, and further performance improvements.

Release Schedule

• Beta Testing: Open right now
• Official Release: Friday, September 4th at 8:00 PM CEST

Links & Resources

• Download Beta: pumpkinmc.org/download
• Report Issues: GitHub Issues

How You Can Help

Try Out Our Multi-Language Plugin API

Calling all developers! PumpkinMC features a built-in plugin API that supports 7 different programming languages, making it flexible to write custom logic in the language you already know best.

Check out the developer documentation and getting started guides here:

👉pumpkinmc.org/developers

And!, Please help us stress-test the build before launch day. If you hit any critical issues, performance bottlenecks, crashes, or weird edge cases, drop an issue on our GitHub with reproduction steps and logs

Our network got hit by a JAR infector between Feb and Aug 2026. We couldn't find any public writeup of it, and we know of five affected German networks — all found independently. So here's everything.

Full technical detail with IoCs: https://gist.github.com/Plattio/d40f53c2e9f962746f3c01a1a244b9e4

How to check, 30 seconds:

find /path/to/server -name "*$(printf '\xe2\x80\x8b')" -ls

That looks for files with an invisible zero-width space appended to the name. The malware hides its encrypted payload in your logs folder, named like a rotated log file. If that returns anything, you're infected.

Why the usual cleanup doesn't work:

• grep on a .jar finds nothing — classes are compressed, strings are base64'd
• the injected method is flagged synthetic+bridge, so decompilers hide it and the source looks clean
• persistence is in ./logs, so replacing every plugin doesn't touch it
• blocking the domain doesn't help, there's a local fallback that loads from that cache file
• our server jar was infected too, with a different injection style than the plugins

If you find it: don't just delete. The cache file is the only way to get the second stage, and it's evidence. Rotate every credential — assume anything the server process could read is gone.

We decrypted stage 2. It's disguised as a fake "DataFixerUpper" plugin, 6.4 MB of legit libraries as padding around one 14 KB class that's Zelix-obfuscated. So we know what gets loaded but still not what it does.

Happy to answer questions.

Hey, Everyone here is a little Video mentioning some of the current problems many server admins and hosters experience, and also Pumpkin, a new Server software which potentially can solve a lot of these issues

https://youtu.be/kuf9A5XZ_b0

Hello! Long time no see. And yes, no worries, this project is on the dayssincelastrustmcserver list, but there is also a Java one...

One of the biggest milestones this year is our built-in Bedrock support

To say it was a pain would be an understatement. On top of our TCP Tokio pipeline, we had to add UDP and implement the RakNet protocol that Bedrock uses (now NetherNet). But the most annoying part is that, unlike Java Edition, Bedrock Edition is completely closed-source. I spent a very "fun" couple of months using Wireshark and talking with devs from the Bedrock Featured Server list, who work closely with Mojang and are practically the only people who actually understand the protocol

Besides Bedrock, a ton of other work has been happening behind the scenes. World generation is now pretty much complete, and a full release is planned very soon! On top of that, our WebAssembly plugin API already supports Rust, Kotlin, C/C++, Python, Go, and TypeScript

Overall, it was totally worth it. I'm super happy that even more admins, developers, and players will now be able to host fast, efficient Minecraft servers! :D