About

One app to rule them all. Charcoal is a unified external workstation for DiamondFire, bringing compatibility across a wide domain of tools.

Although, Charcoal is still in its infancy. Right now, the only available tool is the Template Editor.

History

This idea was seeded during the November 2025 Game Jam, where a workflow problem caused several delays to the overall development time of my team's game. As a result of this workflow issue, I was the only person who was able to do a routine deployment task. Upon explaining my convoluted workflow, my teammate became more confused than ever, to the point of a mental shutdown. Post jam, upon my reflection of the jam process, I've identified a key issue with the external DiamondFire development ecosystem: beyond the unofficial semi-standard mod and its archived predecessor, there are no other methods of communication. Each tool has its own user interface, all different from the other, and even some have broken CSS. The external DiamondFire ecosystem is filled with abandonware and largely incompatible tools.

This allowed me to create Charcoal. The first attempt to unify the DiamondFire ecosystem. Archiving and publishing information and tools. Transforming the workflow of a tool-integrated DiamondFire developer. This project was started on December 3rd, 2025, so .

For this project, I decided to learn Svelte and TypeScript instead of sticking to Flask and Python. Using Svelte and TypeScript enabled me to write faster code — and plus, it was a learning opportunity. I've heard about Svelte from the DFOnline project, so I decided to give it a try.

As of December 31st, 2025 (), the Template Editor is now complete.

Roadmap

The current roadmap includes: in-depth documentation for all DiamondFire actions; a structured data importer; miscellaneous branding elements; package manager and integration with CodeVault; and a domain-specific language.

These goals are also a reason why the Charcoal project exists — to ensure consistency and ease-of-use between the different tools.

DiamondFire

DiamondFire (Discord server, or Minecraft server IP), is a Minecraft server where one can create games and other forms of programming arts in a vanilla Minecraft setting, using DiamondFire's own proprietary plugin, Hypercube. DiamondFire founded its own genre of Minecraft servers, with an exonym of "Creative+", approximately . In DiamondFire, players use code blocks and actions in a sequence to create logic, akin to Scratch or Snap! (in fact, DiamondFire was featured at the Scratch 2017 Conference and the Snapcon 2020).

As one can imagine, creating any sort of complex games or algorithms in Minecraft code blocks is a difficult task, especially with the inherent unfriendly interface of Minecraft. As a result, many DiamondFire players had built external tools that integrates with the server itself, assisting their coding on the server.

DFOnline

DFOnline is a website dedicated to viewing DiamondFire code templates. It was created December 5th, 2021 — . In addition, it provided import and export functionalities, using the lineage of Recode, and now, more contemporary, CodeClient.

DFOnline can be thought of as the competitor to Charcoal — or, rather, Charcoal can be thought of as the competitor to DFOnline. However, that only applies to the Template Editor. One of the goals of the Charcoal project is to ensure that any tasks from the previous scattered ecosystem of DiamondFire can be accomplished, and DFOnline is a good baseline for that metric.

CodeClient

CodeClient is a client-side mod for DiamondFire. Started on December 22nd, 2022 (), originally just a "DiamondFire utility client for advanced coding", it quickly turned into a must-have for DiamondFire players. Currently, it is the only way to beam code templates to DiamondFire, which is done with a WebSocket connection.

Currently, the Template Editor uses CodeClient API to export templates.

Recode

Recode is an archived mod for DiamondFire. It was created on May 1st, 2022, , as the successor of CodeUtilities. It was the de-facto standard mod for DiamondFire, and almost every external tool used this mod to send templates to the game. Recode reached its End-of-Life on September 3rd, 2024, .

CodeUtilities

CodeUtilities, the successor of a previous DFUtils, is the predecessor to Recode. Created on December 27th, 2019, , it reached its End-of-Life on August 20th, 2022, . During the mod's development, most developers and contributors were either hired as DiamondFire's server developers, or quit due to a lack of motivation. CodeUtilities was succeeded by Recode and CodeUtilities-2.0, which was later abandoned on April 24th, 2022, . The two successors are as a result of internal disagreements about the mod's progression.

Credits

I

First and foremost, thank you for using my little program! My name is TempestTempus, also known as HellishBro. You can find me on Discord.

Circuitweaver

rawr :3

- Circuitweaver (aka. AussieBox)

Miscellaneous Information

Actiondump Well-Being

On DiamondFire, as of , there are: