Mirror's Edge in Minecraft

Faith Connors' movement, first-person body, animations and sounds from Mirror's Edge (2008), driving the player in Minecraft Java 26.3. Sprint, vault railings, wallrun, climb drainpipes, walk balance beams, ride ziplines and swing on bars through any Minecraft world, with Faith's own arms and legs in view, under shaders.

Built on tnrjns/faith-runner-minecraft and its movement engine tnrjns/faith-runner. The Rust engine (crates/), the original Fabric mod and the whole Mirror's Edge reimplementation are their work; this repository keeps their history and adds to it (see What's new here). The original repository has no license.

AI disclosure: the additions in this repository were written with Claude (Anthropic's Claude Code), directed and tested by the repository owner.

No game files here. Faith's meshes, textures, animations and sounds are read at startup from your own copy of Mirror's Edge (PC). Nothing from the game is in this repository.

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Contents

• What it does
• What's new in this repository
• Gallery
• Building Mirror's Edge courses out of Minecraft blocks
• Requirements
• Installing
• Shaders (recommended)
• Playing
• Building from source
• Tests
• How it works
• Known limitations
• Credits

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What it does

• Mirror's Edge's movement, move for move. The same Rust controller as faith-runner, rebuilt from the game's own code: the sprint build-up curve, six kinds of vault, wallruns and wall-to-wall jumps, wallclimbs and ledge grabs, shimmying, slides, coil jumps, skill rolls and hard landings, 180° turns, springboards, swing poles, ziplines, balance beams, door barges and kicks, and melee (punches, jump kicks, slide kicks, wallrun kicks). It replaces Minecraft's own movement while she's on.
• Faith's body. Her first-person arms (in the hand pass, so they never clip into walls) and her legs (in the world, so blocks hide them), her camera animations, and her sounds, all from your copy of the game. Each part of her body is lit by the block it's in, and whatever is in your main hand sits in her right hand.
• Minecraft blocks become Mirror's Edge fixtures. Ladders, doors, stairs, slabs, hay, fences, walls, iron bars and chains each become something she uses (the full list is below).
• Plays as Minecraft. Switch her on and off with F8. Swimming, lava, boats, horses, minecarts, elytra and creative flight hand the player back to Minecraft automatically, and she takes over again once you're on your feet, so a whole survival game (Ender Dragon included) is playable.
• Shaders. Works with Iris and Sodium: smooth shading on her body, her own normal and specular maps for LabPBR shader packs, and her body (not Steve's) casting the shadow.

What's new in this repository

On top of the original mod:

Feature	What it does
Water, lava, vehicles and elytra hand-off	Faith has no move for these, so Minecraft takes over while you swim, wade through lava, ride anything, glide or fly in creative, and gives the player back to her once you're on the ground or a ladder. Your speed carries into the dive or the glide. A jump in the air opens the elytra only while she's falling free, never off a wallrun or a ledge.
Drainpipes	Upright chains, end rods or lightning rods (3+ blocks) against a wall: she climbs them and out onto the roof.
Ziplines	A line of horizontal chains stepping down a block at a time: jump up to it and ride it down.
Balance beams	A straight run of fences or walls along the top of a one-block-wide wall: her balance walk, with the game's lean model.
Railings	Fences and walls are as high to her as they look (one block, not Minecraft's anti-jump block and a half), so she vaults them.
Smooth shading under shaders	Iris was flattening her normals to one per triangle, so her skin looked faceted, like stone. Fixed.
Her normal and specular maps	Her skin, glove and clothes keep their detail (muscle, folds, creases) under LabPBR shader packs, read from your copy of the game and converted at startup.
Crash fix	Changing resource or shader packs mid-game no longer crashes once her maps are loaded.
Melee hits mobs	Her punches, jump kicks, slide kicks and wallrun kicks hurt and knock back Minecraft mobs, with Mirror's Edge's own target choice, hit tests and damage (scaled so a mob takes as many blows as a cop would). Reach is measured to the mob's side rather than its middle, with a little extra leeway, so big and small mobs get hit too, and a blow lands on whichever mob it reaches. Kills count as yours: loot, XP, advancements.
Footstep and hand surfaces	Her steps sound like what she's on: concrete, wood, metal, grating, airduct (copper grates), ladders, pipes (chains, rods), chain-link (bars), glass, cardboard (wool, hay) and water, from her feet on the floor or the wall she's running along and her hands on what she holds.
Controls screen	A "Faith Runner controls" button on the pause menu: every key as it's bound now, tips for her harder moves, and the blocks she uses, with a shortcut to Minecraft's key bindings.
Distant Horizons	-PwithDH adds Distant Horizons to the dev and test runs (alongside -PwithIris).
More tests	Client game tests for each of the above, a close-up suite for judging her body under shaders, and options to pick suites, shader settings and a resource pack. ./gradlew deploy works again.

Gallery

All captured from the mod's own client tests (Fabric client game tests drive the real game), under Iris with Complementary Reimagined (LabPBR mode) and the Simplista texture pack.

Vault and wallrun

Drainpipe and balance beam

Zipline and swing bars

Slide

The whole run in one video (1280x720, about a minute): docs/media/showcase.mp4.

Her body under shaders. Before and after the shading fix (left: faceted; right: smooth), and with her own normal and specular maps (bottom row):

Building Mirror's Edge courses out of Minecraft blocks

Build this	She does this
Ladder or vines up a wall	Climbs it; steps off the top onto the roof if there's room. Vines hanging free or growing on leaves aren't ladders, and she only climbs as high as there's headroom.
Upright chains / end rods / lightning rods, 3+ high, against a wall	Climbs it as a drainpipe, and over the top onto the roof.
Horizontal chains in a line, each level with the last or one lower, 6+ long, sloping 4–30° (one step down every 2 to 14 chains), with room to hang under it and a floor 1–3.5 m below its top end	A zipline: jump up to grab it and ride it down.
Fences or walls in a straight line, 3+ long, along the top of a one-block-wide wall (nothing beside them at their level or the block below)	A balance beam: she walks it with her balance model. Look or lean off it and she loses her balance.
Fence or wall on the ground	A railing to vault.
Iron bars, copper bars or fences with 2 clear blocks under them	A swing pole: jump to it, pump, fly off.
Wooden door (closed)	Barge through it at a run, or kick it open standing (melee); the Minecraft door opens.
Stairs (straight, bottom half)	A ramp she runs up.
Slabs / half blocks	Step-ups.
Hay bale or slime block	A soft landing for a big drop.
Anything solid	Walls to wallrun (1.9 m+ tall) and wallclimb, ledges to grab, obstacles to vault, edges to springboard off.

Water deeper than a block, lava, boats, horses, minecarts, an open elytra and creative or spectator flight are all Minecraft's while they last; she takes over again on the ground.

Requirements

• Mirror's Edge (2008) for PC: Steam (app 17410) or the EA app. Not Mirror's Edge Catalyst: that's a different engine with different files. Without the game the movement still works, but there's no body, camera animation or sound.
• Minecraft Java 26.3, Fabric Loader 0.19.5, Fabric API 0.161.0+26.3.
• Java 25 (the launcher's own runtime for 26.3 is fine). Minecraft must be started with --enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED in its JVM arguments.
• Windows.
• To build: Rust (stable) and a JDK 25.

Installing

1. Install Mirror's Edge (PC). The usual Steam, EA and Origin folders are found by themselves.
2. Install Fabric Loader 0.19.5 for 26.3 (the Fabric installer, client, no profile needed).
3. In the launcher, make a profile on fabric-loader-0.19.5-26.3. Give it its own game directory (e.g. %APPDATA%\.minecraft\faithrunner-26.3), and add --enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED to its JVM arguments.
4. Put Fabric API and faithrunner-1.0.0.jar in that directory's mods/, and faith_ffi.dll in the directory itself. (Build them as below, or run ./gradlew deploy, which builds both and puts them there.)
5. Start the game once. config/faithrunner.properties is written in the game directory:
   • faith_ffi: the path to the DLL, if you keep it somewhere else;
   • mirrors_edge: your Mirror's Edge folder, if it isn't in a usual place.

Shaders (recommended)

The look in the gallery:

1. Sodium 0.9.2 and Iris 1.11.7 for 26.3 in mods/.
2. Complementary Reimagined r5.9.3 in shaderpacks/, selected in Video Settings → Shader Packs.
3. In its Shader Settings, set RP Support to labPBR, so Faith's normal and specular maps are used. (Optional: Camera → Motion Blur on, for the blur when turning.)
4. For the blocks, a LabPBR resource pack, e.g. Simplista (64x, clean, made for 26.3). Without one, LabPBR mode leaves blocks plainer than Complementary's default mode.

Playing

Key	Action
F8	Faith on / off
WASD, mouse	Move, look
Space	Jump, vault, wallrun, wallclimb, grab, pull up, kick off a wall
Shift	Crouch, slide (at a run), coil (in the air), roll (just before landing), let go
Z	180° turn (on the ground, in the air, on a wall, ledge or pole; on a wallrun, look out from the wall to jump across to another)
Left click	Melee: punches, jump kick, slide kick, wallrun kick; barges and kicks doors. While she's on it replaces Minecraft's attack and mining (switch her off with F8 to break blocks)

F8, Z and the melee click can be rebound in Controls. WASD, Space and Shift are Minecraft's own bindings. In game, Faith Runner controls on the pause menu lists them all, as they're bound now.

Tips:

• Sprint builds up like the game's: 4 m/s at 0.4 s up to 7.2 m/s at 7 s. Whipping the view round sheds speed.
• Wallrun: run at a wall at an angle, jump, hold forward. To wallrun a wall you're already beside, hold a little A or D toward it as you jump.
• Roll out of drops over 2 m by pressing Shift in the last 0.2 s before landing; drops of 5.3 m+ otherwise stop you dead.
• Dodge: A or D + Space.

She works in singleplayer: the integrated server accepts her movement (no "moved wrongly"), and Minecraft's fall damage is off while she's in control (her own hard landings stand in for it).

Building from source

# the engine, as faith_ffi.dll (target/release/)
cargo build --release -p faith_ffi

# the mod (minecraft/build/libs/faithrunner-1.0.0.jar)
cd minecraft
./gradlew build

# or both, copied into %APPDATA%\.minecraft\faithrunner-26.3 (mods/ and the game folder)
./gradlew deploy

Tests

Fabric client game tests start the real game, build a world, switch Faith on and drive her through each kind of block, failing on the first thing that doesn't work. Screenshots go to minecraft/build/run/clientGameTest/screenshots.

Suite	Checks
Blocks	Ladders, doors, stairs, slabs, hay, swing bars, a held item, punches, her shadow
HandOff	A dive into a pool and a swim out, a one-deep ditch (no hand-off), lava, a boat, an elytra glide off a tower
CloseUp	Her body large in frame at 1600x900 (punch at a wall, door kick, vault, a row of materials), for judging shading
Fixtures	Drainpipe, zipline, fence beam, wall beam, railing vault, hanging vines (not climbed), getting out of leaves
Showcase	Footage only (runs only when named): the course in the gallery, logging when each move starts so a recording can be cut

cd minecraft
./gradlew runClientGameTest --no-configuration-cache                    # all suites
./gradlew runClientGameTest -Ptests=Fixtures,HandOff --no-configuration-cache   # just these

# the gallery's footage: the window opened at 1280x720 (recordable), shaders, LabPBR, Simplista
./gradlew runClientGameTest -Ptests=Showcase -PwindowSize=1280x720 -PwithIris -PwithShader   -PshaderOptions="RP_MODE=3,MOTION_BLUR_EFFECT=1" -PresourcePack=<Simplista.zip> --no-configuration-cache

# under Iris + Sodium with a shader pack, its options, and a resource pack
./gradlew runClientGameTest -PwithIris -PwithShader -PshaderZip=<pack.zip> \
  -PshaderOptions="RP_MODE=3" -PresourcePack=<pack.zip> --no-configuration-cache

The engine's own tests: cargo test. The animation tests need ME_INSTALL set to your Mirror's Edge folder; without it they pass without checking anything.

How it works

• Engine (crates/, Rust): faith_move is Mirror's Edge's movement, rebuilt from the game's code and native routines; faith_anim plays its animations on her skeleton; me_assets reads the game's Unreal Engine 3 packages (meshes, animations, textures, sound) from your install; faith_ffi wraps it all as faith_ffi.dll.
• Mod (minecraft/, Java, Fabric): calls the DLL through Java's foreign function API. Each frame it steps her with your input and puts the player where she is. Every few ticks it reads the blocks around you as her collision, marking ladders, doors, pipes, beams, poles, ziplines and soft landings as Mirror's Edge fixtures. It draws her body in Minecraft's hand pass and world pass, and with Iris hands her normal and specular maps to the shader pack as LabPBR textures. Mixins switch off Minecraft's own movement while she drives, and hand the player back to it for water, lava, vehicles and elytra.

Known limitations

• Singleplayer only. The server-side relaxations apply to the singleplayer owner.
• Reaction Time (slow motion) isn't there.
• Her melee only hurts mobs in singleplayer (the damage is applied on the integrated server).
• No fall damage while she's in control. Her hard landings stand in for it.
• Chains sit in the middle of their block, so on a drainpipe she hangs half a block further from the wall than in the game, and a zipline looks like a staircase of chains.
• Coming out of water, a vehicle or a glide, she starts from a standstill.
• LabPBR shader mode needs a LabPBR resource pack for blocks to keep their materials.

Credits

• tnrjns: faith-runner (the Mirror's Edge movement and animation engine) and faith-runner-minecraft (the Fabric mod this is built on).
• Mirror's Edge © Electronic Arts / DICE. This project needs your own copy, and contains none of its files.
• Minecraft © Mojang Studios. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Mojang or Microsoft.
• Fabric, Iris and Sodium, Complementary Reimagined by EminGT, and Simplista by ShivamZter appear in the screenshots. None of them are included here.
• Additions in this repository written with Claude (Anthropic).