What is godot_voxel?

Godot Voxel Tools is an add-on for the Godot game engine that lets developers create large three-dimensional terrains made of voxels. A voxel is essentially a tiny cube that acts as a building block in a 3D world, similar to how the blocks in Minecraft work. By stacking and removing these cubes, you can build landscapes with hills, caves, tunnels, and overhangs, which is something traditional height-map terrains cannot do. The module supports two main terrain styles. The first is a blocky, Minecraft-like look where the world is made of clearly defined cubes with different materials and baked-in lighting for ambient shadows. The second is a smooth terrain style that blends the voxel edges together so the landscape looks more natural, like rolling hills or organic cave formations. Terrains built with this tool can be infinite in size. The system loads and unloads chunks of terrain as a player moves through the world, so only the nearby area is held in memory at any given time. You can write your own code to generate the terrain procedurally, load it from saved data, or define it through other sources. The add-on also includes a system for placing decorations such as trees, rocks, or grass on terrain surfaces, a level-of-detail system for the smooth terrain mode (which reduces visual complexity for distant areas to improve performance), and physics integration so players and objects interact properly with the terrain. Players can also edit the terrain in real time during a running game. This is a community-maintained project built by volunteers and supported by donations. It works with Godot Engine 4 and can be added either as a compiled module or as a GDExtension, which is Godot's plugin format that does not require recompiling the engine itself.