[Media] I finally built the Minecraft launcher I wanted to make when I started programming 7 years ago

Hello everyone! This is Basalt, a Minecraft launcher that I originally created for my own use. The idea of making my own launcher has been on my mind ever since I started programming around seven years ago.

I tried building one several times over the years, but none of those attempts turned out the way I wanted them to. Eventually, I stopped trying. However, after gaining a lot more experience, I decided to revisit the idea and give it another proper shot.

Most of the launchers I tried either looked the way I wanted but didn't work well, or worked well but didn't look the way I wanted. This is what ultimately pushed me to create my own. After using Basalt myself for a while, I decided it would be better to release it as open source than to leave it sitting in a private repository.

Now I know some people will think "we already have x, y, and z launchers" and tbh, it's fine. I made this for personal use, but it's yours too if you want it.

Basalt does the things you expect from a launcher: separate instances, mod loader support, and downloading mods, modpacks, resource packs and datapacks from CurseForge and Modrinth.

What's different is that it's artwork-led. I wanted to keep the functionality without giving up the look. Besides this, We have stats tracker so you can see how long you've actually played and credentials go into the system keychain.

The project uses tauri as its framework. The frontend is React.

There are also a few things I added because I kept needing them. It imports your instances from Prism, ATLauncher and the Modrinth app without touching the originals, so you can try it without committing to anything. It takes a snapshot of an instance before risky changes, so if an update breaks your setup you can go back. And when the game crashes it reads the log and tries to tell you what happened instead of leaving you to scroll through it.

It's still beta. The launcher is mainly designed for Linux but it can run on Windows and macOS too. We have NixOS support through a flake that builds from source rather than pulling a prebuilt binary, basalt-launcher-bin and basalt-launcher-dev-bin on the AUR, and AppImage and Debian packages on the releases page. No Flatpak yet.

The AUR packages exist but AUR has pushes disabled at the moment, so they arent updating. On Arch, extract the .deb and copy the files in yourself rather than running debtap on it.

AI Usage Disclaimer: Im not a UI/UX designer, so I used GPT-5.6 Sol as a help with some parts of the frontend design, as well as for occasional debugging. The Rust backend is entirely my own work.

Repo: https://github.com/MegalithOfficial/basalt-launcher

This launcher is not a official Minecraft Product or Its not Approved by or Associated with Mojang or Microsoft.