A developer known online as Jetsetworm has brought Minecraft-style infinite terrain generation, crafting and a furnace into Deadlock, Valve's online game built on the Source 2 engine. The project, called Deadblock, was covered by 80 Level on October 8, 2026, which stressed that all the code was written by hand, with no help from AI.

Minecraft rebuilt in someone else's engine

Deadblock isn't a Minecraft mod in the traditional sense. It's more the reverse: mechanics familiar to Minecraft players were implemented from scratch inside Deadlock. The author recreated crafting, a cobblestone generator, armor and mobs (skeletons, zombies and slimes), among other things, and the whole thing is fully playable rather than just a technical demo. The project caught the community's attention precisely because it reproduces the core of the original game so faithfully, including the crafting system Minecraft players know well.

Omni-treadmill, or how to trick Valve's engine

The biggest obstacle was Deadlock's limit on the playable area, roughly plus or minus 16,000 engine units, which corresponds to about 36 chunks in Minecraft. Jetsetworm got around this limit by building a mechanism called the "omni-treadmill," which lets players move through a theoretically infinite, blocky world while the character in the game engine barely moves at all. It's a purely programming-based solution, not the result of any graphical shortcut or trick.

Months of work from a developer who writes medical software for a living

According to 80 Level, Jetsetworm works professionally on medical software, and Deadblock is the result of months of work in his spare time. The project stands out from the wave of flashy but shallow "AI mashups" flooding social media in 2026: here, every part of the engine, from terrain generation to block physics, was written and tested by hand.

Full multiplayer and inventory already working

According to information shared by Gabe Follower, a well-known creator in the Deadlock community, Deadblock recently received full multiplayer support along with a working inventory system. The project still isn't publicly available for download, and for now its progress can only be followed through gameplay footage shared by the author. It's not yet known whether or when Deadblock will reach a wider group of Deadlock players.

Another entry in the trend of porting Minecraft elsewhere

The Minecraft community has long been known for ambitious technical projects, like massive redstone machines, working computers and recreations of entire cities, so rebuilding similar mechanics in a completely different engine fits the same tradition of creativity, just seen from the other side of the mirror. Projects like this rarely make it onto official distribution platforms, so players who just want to build and dig in the original still have the standard route: downloading Minecraft Java Edition and browsing ready-made ideas in the mods section on our site. Deadblock, meanwhile, shows how recognizable Minecraft's design remains, given that programmers want to faithfully recreate it even in a completely foreign engine.

Sources