All started as a mod about dust on chests

October 29th

Well, it was mostly a quick idea that spiraled into a "why not" situation.
I was working and had a while to let some background scripts do their job, so I was practically just waiting, and at some point I found myself thinking:

What about going into an abandoned building on a server and finding dust all around where a player used to have their base?

It was one of those random ideas that pop into your head and refuse to leave, so I started sketching out a quick, stupid little idea just to see if I could actually make it work.

As part of my ongoing obsession with keeping things as unobtrusive as possible for the vanilla game and other mods (you're going to hate me, but I'm going to say it in every damn blog post, yes), I started thinking about ways to have some dust sitting on top of chests.

What if you could open that chest and slowly see the dust disappear?

That felt pretty cool and immersive to me. I started reusing some logic I'd previously made for an unreleased prospecting mod, which had some ways of spawning particles, but then I started wondering: what if, instead of relying only on particles, we could simply add an overlay to existing blocks?

So I started looking into how things were rendered in vanilla. While digging around, I stumbled upon the render order for opaque stages, with all its references to the moon, sky rendering, blocks, particles and so on, and I thought: what about making an overlay layer?

I asked a gamedev friend of mine if he could help me put together a simple shader to use as a starting point. We gave it a shot, did some testing throughout the day, and eventually got something working on top of chests.

It wasn't much, but I was pretty proud of it, enough to make a little comment about it on the official VS Discord in the mod-general channel.

Looking back, this was probably the point where things started getting out of hand.

The first commit came on October 30th, and the project was called Dust. Nothing particularly fancy, no big plans, just a little experiment to see whether I could make dusty chests happen.

But then I started thinking about floors.

Because, well, if there's dust on chests, why wouldn't there be dust on the floor? And if there's dust on the floor, shouldn't there be ways to remove it? Maybe walls too? And what about other kinds of environmental buildup?

You can probably see where this was going.

I initially approached this as a small visual addition, but the more I experimented, the more I realised the scope was slowly growing beyond what I'd initially set out to do. I could have stopped there and kept it as a tiny chest-related mod, but honestly, I'm quite dumb and like having too much on my hands, and I was having fun exploring the possibilities.

And it didn't really stop after work either. I found myself taking notes on my phone while doing chores, thinking about new ways to expand things and quickly putting down ideas before forgetting them (my gf can testify). Dust eventually became floors and then walls, after that came moss, rust, caves, and now soot.

Suddenly this wasn't really about dusty chests anymore.

At some point I realised that maybe the project deserved a name that wasn't quite so literal and narrow-minded. While looking back through the history, I stumbled upon one of my own commits from when I'd been calling things three different names in the code and finally snapped at myself, and I think it perfectly captures that moment:

"we have a name? USE IT no?"

And well... here we are.

It's still not released, and right now I'm deep in soot (fireplaces, chimneys, the works). If you want to try it before anyone else, especially on a modded server or an old world with ruins, you can sign up for early testing under this post.

And if you've got a weird idea for something else that should get old over time, tell me. Apparently I can't say no to those.