Minecraft

UPDATE(2025 March): This has been integrated into sh.ironforge.minecraft. Just use that -- it works out of the box on Ironforge.

A supported way to get Minecraft running on Iron Forge

Getting Minecraft to run well is, non-trivial, to say the least.

First off, Minecraft requires X11 and IronForge does not support that.

We could make it supported by installing a full XWayland suite. But that would bring in all of X11 into at least the build chain of IronForge and that is simple not worth it at this point: way too much of an overkill in effort just for a single application.

But there is something called https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope that is reasonable to use. It is basically a embedded XWayland server designed for video games. Importantly, Gamescope is available as a Flatpak!

Installing required components

Install Minecraft:

flatpak install com.mojang.Minecraft

Install Gamescope:

flatpak install org.freedesktop.Platform.VulkanLayer.gamescope

The Gamescope runtime will be available from Minecraft, so we can wrap the call to Minecraft with the Gamescope server.

However, the fun does not stop here.

We need to configure also a Secrets Manager if we want to be able to persist the credentials and not having to login every single time we start the Minecraft launcher.

That is how gnome-keyring came into IronForge.

There is no real use case besides getting Minecraft to save credentials. Maybe you have other use cases for it. I would love to hear that it is useful beyond saving the login credentials for Minecraft. ;-)

Running Minecraft

Launch Minecraft:

flatpak run \
    --command=/usr/lib/extensions/vulkan/gamescope/bin/gamescope \
    --env=MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5COMPAT \
    com.mojang.Minecraft -- minecraft