Ask for a game and Cog writes you a playable one.

Cog joins your world like a player, on a properly hosted server. Which is why joining a Cubelings world needs nothing more than an ordinary, unmodified copy of the game — the same one your friends already have installed.

Every one of these has been built in a real world, from somebody typing a sentence. Ask for any of them tonight.

• Whatever you describe — designed on the spot, not picked off a list. A walk-in house shaped like SpongeBob, with rooms inside it. A pirate galleon out on the open sea, thirty thousand blocks of it.
• New games, loaded while you play — not a pitch to look at, a game to play on it. Ask for soccer and Cog lays the field and writes the rules: goals that count, a scoreboard, pads that hand out snowballs, fireworks for the winner. It goes live on the running server in about a second, with nobody kicked off and nothing to install.
• Canyons and waterfalls — a gorge with terraced walls and banded rock, and water that falls off the rim into a pool that stays put.
• Lakes, hills and flat ground — a basin with a proper shoreline, raised ground with a natural profile, or a plot levelled to build on.
• Landmarks — pyramids with a chamber you can stand in, watchtowers with a stair that climbs one block a step, castle keeps with walls you can walk along.
• Places to live — houses with doors that open and lit interiors, and arenas that are fair at both ends, symmetric to the block.
• Roads and bridges — routes that read the ground they cross, and spans over open water with the deck raised clear of it.
• Rollercoasters — a loop of real track with a hill in it, powered rails to keep you moving, and a cart waiting at the station. Get in.
• Real redstone — a hidden door wired block by block. Pull the lever and the wall slides across.
• Playing alongside you — mining, crafting, farming, fighting, fetching, and following you around.

Watch each of these get built →

A datapack changes what the world does — a goal that counts, a pad that hands you something, a timer. Nothing in one has ever changed a picture. That takes a resource pack, which is a different file entirely, and it is loaded by each player's own game rather than by the server.

So when you ask for a cartoon blaster, Cog does both. They draw the thing, wrap it into a resource pack, and send it to everybody standing in the world — no restart. Then they write the arena around it: stand on the pad and one is put in your hands, everybody can see everybody else's health under their name, kills count up the side, first to five wins.

Ask for more and you get more, because none of it is a special case. Red team and blue team, picked by standing on a pad. Anybody who arrives mid-round watching from spectator until it is over. Shots everybody can see, that go off where they land. Those are rules, and Cog writes rules.

The one honest catch: a resource pack is your own game loading a picture, so it asks you first. Say no and you keep playing, holding the ordinary item. Nobody is thrown off a world for declining a texture.

Cog draws the item as a grid of characters with a palette, and deterministic code turns that into the actual image — the same bargain as everywhere else here, where the imagining is theirs and the part that has to be exactly right is not left to a guess.

Then they look at it, which is the part that matters. A first attempt at sixteen pixels is a lump, for the same reason a first attempt at a dragon is: they are drawing something they cannot see. So several are drawn at once, measured, and the best one goes back to them with the picture and one question — would somebody know what this is at the size of a fingernail?

The measuring catches the failure that always comes first. Cog's very first blaster filled 96% of its own outline, which is to say it was a rectangle in nice colours, and it was handed straight back with that number attached. Drawn properly, with drafts and a round of looking at them, the same request comes back at 43%: a barrel, a grip, a muzzle, and daylight around all three.

Hytale is next on the list. It was designed for dedicated servers with a plugin system from day one, which is a genuinely different starting point to Minecraft. Getting the builder running there is real engineering work, not a shortcut we are assuming will just work — an early spike already proved that authoring and loading new server-side code can be fast and safe, which is the part that work will actually depend on.

When it plans "gather some wood, then build a road", it is reasoning about what you want — a route, a quantity, a material — not about one game's particular blocks. The part that is specific to a game is the layer underneath: the code that knows what a Minecraft repeater's facing means, or what the equivalent call looks like elsewhere. Swapping games means swapping that layer, not rebuilding everything on top of it.

Two things carry across without change: asking in plain language and having it work out the details, described in How it works, and the habit of checking its own result afterwards, described in Verification. Neither depends on which game is running underneath.

Whichever game is running, Cog lives on the server and players join with an unmodified client. Nothing changes on a player's machine, and that holds for Hytale as well.