December 16, 2025
Blocks, beef, and billion-mile boasts
Bonsai: A Voxel Engine, from scratch
From-scratch block engine says you can see from Jupiter to the sun, comments go wild
TLDR: Bonsai is a from-scratch block-world engine with wild “see everything” claims and a GPU-made landscape, now in pre-alpha. Commenters asked for a demo video, side-eyed the license, and brawled over ray tracing versus the usual rendering—making this one to watch for both tech feats and community fire.
Bonsai is a home‑grown block (voxel) engine flexing an outrageous claim: you can see the entire world, all the time—basically a straight line from Jupiter to the sun. The dev says it’s simple and made largely from scratch, with terrain cooked on your graphics card via shaders. Cue the crowd asking, “Cool… but show us video.” One hunter dropped a link for the curious here, and the demo thirst was real.
Then the drama hit: the license. One commenter declared “btw the license is nuts,” sparking side‑eye and speculation about what strings are attached. On the softer side, fans begged for the dev’s “simplicity journey” write‑up—turns out people are as into the story as the tech. Meanwhile, the nerd fight of the day: ray tracing vs the usual way games draw images. A bold take claimed “it’s really not that hard to ray trace” and linked a walkthrough here, while another crowd waved a performance flex with “I Optimised My Game Engine Up To 12000 FPS” video.
It’s pre‑alpha, Windows/Linux only, and currently a terrain generator/editor you can tinker with via Discord. The vibe? Equal parts awe at the “see‑forever” boast, suspicion about the license, and playful heckling to ship a clip. Someone bring sunscreen for that Jupiter‑to‑sun view.
Key Points
- •Bonsai is a from-scratch voxel engine with fully procedural, GLSL-based GPU terrain generation.
- •The current release is 2.0.0-prealpha-rc0, a major rewrite focusing on world generation, the editor, and parts of the renderer.
- •It targets massive worlds (~1 billion blocks cubed) and claims full-world view distance at all times.
- •Build requirements are minimal: clang++ >= 18.1 and system headers; prebuilt binaries are available for Windows and Linux.
- •Features include advanced rendering (deferred shading, HDR, OIT, SSAO), engine tools (hot reloading, async jobs), SDF-based editing, and an integrated profiler; a wishlist outlines future graphics and terrain features.