Shadowlight, a voice-driven murder mystery and heist inside Minecraft
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We built Shadowlight because we wanted NPCs that feel alive in Minecraft, and because we think conversation can be a real skill loop, not just flavor text.Shadowlight is a solo Minecraft experience where talking is the main mechanic. NPCs are LLM-powered with different personalities and communication styles, and you progress by earning trust through good listening, calibrated tone, and smart questioning.Your goal is simple: interview the manor’s characters, gather clues, and figure out who is guilty.At the end of each run, you get feedback on your conversations. The goal is to reflect back what worked and what didn’t in how you communicated, so you can adjust your approach on the next run.Try it for free by joining our Minecraft server: mc.playshadowlight.comTrailer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6867RsSxhSE&t=42sGameplay Video: https://www.loom.com/share/dff09df831de4a588d9fee9a055cfec1We would love feedback on what resonate with you and what you would like to see in this kind of experience.
HN · launched Dec 31, 2025 · 24 upvotes (top 31%) · 1 view
Niche: video game mods and managers · 278 launches, 17 in the last 7 days ▼ -55% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Agent / copilot
- B2C
- AI feature
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 278 launches in video game mods and managers →
Could you build this?
Partial The LLM prompt engineering and narrative design are accessible, but integrating real-time voice recognition, speech-to-text, LLM state machines, and text-to-speech seamlessly into a Minecraft mod or custom server plugin is technically demanding.
What it would actually take: Requires a custom Minecraft server plugin (Paper/Spigot) or Fabric/Forge client mod communicating via WebSockets to a Python/Node backend. The backend coordinates low-latency STT (e.g., Whisper/Deepgram), an LLM conversational agent with in-game spatial memory and state tracking, and rapid TTS (e.g., ElevenLabs/Cartesia) streamed back as 3D in-game audio packets.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Concern about profit motive overriding social benefit, Risk of unhealthy attachment to AI characters
Feature requests: AI nudges for empathy in interpersonal interactions, Real-time social coaching during conversations
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 126 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #39 of 127 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 54 days after the earliest competitor.
- Shadowslavedle · ph · 2026-10-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Practice Shadowing · ph · 2026-11-01 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Town · hn · 2026-07-14 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- ShadowGunRevived · github · 2026-10-24 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- lightcraft · github · 2026-09-30 · 190 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Spirit Realm Hunter: AR · ph · 2026-11-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- hollow-crown · github · 2026-09-24 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Shadowing Practice · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
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