A bright idea Minecraft is quickly becoming the new Doom in that enthusiasts are eager to install the game on the most obscure of hardware. The latest example comes from YouTuber vimpo, who managed to install the sandbox game server on a smart light bulb
The bulb of choice was a cheap Wi-Fi unit from AliExpress that's powered by the BL602 chipset. As Tom's Hardware highlights, it features a single RISC-V core clocked at up to 192 MHz alongside 276 KB of RAM and 128 KB of ROM. The hardware hacker wasted little time cracking open the bulb, extracting the microcontroller, and wiring it up to an adapter board for reliable access.
With inputs and a display all set up, the next step was to install the Minecraft server. For this, vimpo went with a low-resource implementation known as Ucraft that was written in C. According to its GitHub description, Ucraft lacks almost all of the features you would find on a vanilla server – think bare minimum.
The server binary size is just 46K bytes without authentication (or 90K bytes with an authentication library). Memory usage varies depending on how many players are connected at any given time. In a worst-case scenario with 10 players, heap usage will top out around 20K bytes without authentication or 70K bytes with it.
Minecraft has been receiving a lot of attention from the modding community as of late. Back in September, a gamer built a functional version of ChatGPT inside the game using 439 million blocks. It was terribly slow by modern standards but the project proved it could be done.
Earlier in the year, someone got the game to run on a 20 year old GPU with just 8MB of VRAM – a 3D Phantom XP-2800 from Pine Technology, to be exact. In late 2024, another modder released tools and instructions to run a game server using COBOL, a programming language that debuted back in the 50s and was originally meant for business IT systems.
Yes, it runs Minecraft: Hacker turns cheap Wi-Fi light bulb into functional game server
