When did Horizon start?

Our sources don't give a founding date we can verify, so we don't state one. The earliest dated facts in the project's own docs are October 2026 releases and the 13 October 2026 subsystem audit.

Ludovic Marie. The project's docs describe it as his project: he decides what it does and what ships, with most code written by AI agents and contributions from others.

Why were shader packs removed in October 2026?

On 24 October 2026 a developer of Iris showed that Horizon's shader pack code had been written from Iris's source. Horizon removed it and adopted a rule that its code may only be written from Minecraft 26.3 and public documentation.

Horizon History: From Dated Builds to Nightlies and Native Mods

Horizon’s public history is short and fast. Everything below comes from dated statements in the project’s own docs, release notes and registry. In October 2026 it went from releases named after their day to numbered 0.2 releases, published its first audit against vanilla (13 October), moved everyone to a single Nightly channel (23 October), removed and restarted its shader pack support (24 October), and turned its built-in extras into native mods (29 October). By 9 November 2026 the latest launcher was 0.2.56 and the mod registry held 120 projects.

We’ve left out anything we couldn’t date from a primary source, including the exact day the project began.

Key dated events from the project's docs and registry, autumn 2026.

Release naming: from dates to 0.2

Early releases were named after the day they came out, with tags like v2026.10.12 and names like 2026.10.19.15. Since 0.2, every release has a number: 0.2.0, then 0.2.1, 0.2.2 and so on, with the game and the launcher counting separately. Every 0.2 release counts as newer than all the dated ones, which is why an old server may need horizon-server update --version v0.2.0 once. Launchers from before 0.2 (0.16 or older) update twice in a row, first to 0.17, then to 0.2.

Two launcher milestones appear in the docs without exact dates: the Servers page arrived in launcher 0.15, and the Mods page’s Modrinth search in 0.17.

October 2026

13 October: the project audits each of its 14 subsystems against vanilla, from the game loop to block ticking. The home page publishes the result with a caveat: “It is not a parity claim.” Horizon described 281 differential harnesses at the start; see how Horizon checks itself against vanilla.
17 October: dedicated servers start checking Minecraft accounts in online mode (release v2026.10.17.07), names added to whitelists become real accounts (v2026.10.17.14), and movement checks arrive (v2026.10.17.16).
19 October: the server bot benchmark compares horizon-server with vanilla, Paper and Fabric with Lithium. The security notes from that day list signed checksums as live for new releases.
22 October: Ludovic Marie decides to count every running game with an anonymous “I’m playing” ping, and to say so in the launcher; see how many people play Horizon. The ThinkPad laptop runs on the Benchmarks page are measured the same day.
23 October: one channel. Every release becomes the latest at once, published only after its smoke test and while no release-blocker issue is open. The old flow, with a 6-hour beta before stable, is gone. Why that matters for you: Nightly or stable?
24 October: a developer of Iris shows that Horizon’s shader pack code had been written from Iris’s source. Horizon removes shader packs (pull request #1561) and adopts a rule that its code may only be written from Minecraft 26.3 and public documentation, never from another mod, loader or renderer. The Iris-format loader is rewritten from a description of the format.
25 October: the docs count 326 harnesses.
28 to 31 October: a wave of community native mods lands in the registry, including Veinminer (28 October), Mouse Tricks, TreeFall and SmartF3 (29 October), JEI for Horizon (30 October) and Fullbright (31 October).
29 October: Horizon’s own Zoom, FPS Counter, Minimap, Keystrokes and Recipes become native mods (2.0.0), built into the game by the launcher. Players who had the old extras switched on get them installed automatically, settings included. An unofficial Rust port of Distant Horizons appears the same day.

November 2026

1 November: Horizon clients sign their chat on online-mode servers (Nightly 2026-11-01 and newer).
3 November: Nightlies gain the typed mod API. The first Horizon-format shader packs appear in the registry, Daybreak and Radiant. The same day, a mod called crossversion is paused in the registry while its Microsoft sign-in is reviewed.
4 November: ports of Wisdom Shaders V3 and its Lite version arrive, along with Montarc. The client benchmarks on the Benchmarks page span 22 October to 4 November.
6 and 7 November: Lumina, Lumen and Pastel Mystic, then Nimbe, bring the registry to nine shader packs. Our ranking is in best Horizon shaders.
8 November: launcher 0.2.56 ships.

Where things stood on 9 November 2026

Releases: 319 on GitHub across the launcher, the game and the Nightlies; launcher 0.2.56 is the newest. Browse them on our releases page.
GitHub stars: 8,157 on the horizon-rust/horizon repository.
Contributors: the home page lists 283 people with commits.
Registry: 120 projects in the index generated on 8 November: 104 native mods, 6 content mods, 9 shader packs and 1 resource pack. Zoom led with 60,337 downloads on 9 November.

How the project works, briefly

Horizon is Ludovic Marie’s project. Its docs say most code is written by AI agents (Claude sessions he runs, plus contributors’ own tools), some by hand, and that every change is checked automatically against the real game rather than read line by line. That model explains the pace above, and also why the project publishes its weak spots, from security gaps to benchmarks where Java Edition wins. More in what Horizon is and Is Horizon safe?

Horizon's history so far: a dated timeline