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Installation

You need rustup and a recent nightly. Jackdaw currently targets the toolchain pinned at the top of .github/workflows/ci.yaml (as of writing, nightly-2026-03-05). Anything close to that should work, but if you hit weird type-system errors, set:

rustup install nightly-2026-03-05
rustup default nightly-2026-03-05

Linux system deps

You’ll want the same packages bevy needs:

sudo apt install libasound2-dev libudev-dev libwayland-dev

Adjust for your package manager on other distros. macOS needs nothing extra.

Windows

Two gotchas, both from dependencies rather than jackdaw itself.

cmake picks the wrong compiler. Jackdaw’s CSG kernel (manifold-csg-sys) builds a C++ library with cmake. If MinGW GCC is on your PATH (it ships with Git for Windows and Strawberry Perl), cmake selects it instead of MSVC and the resulting object files fail to link with LNK1143: invalid or corrupt file. Force the Visual Studio generator before building:

$env:CMAKE_GENERATOR = "Visual Studio 17 2022"
cargo install --git https://github.com/jbuehler23/jackdaw --force

Do not set CC=cl / CXX=cl to fix this; that breaks other crates (e.g. ring) that rely on cmake’s own compiler detection.

Prefer the Vulkan backend. Some DX12 driver/wgpu combinations hit validation panics in the renderer. If you see a crash inside wgpu-core (an assertion left == right failed in render.rs), force Vulkan:

$env:WGPU_BACKEND = "vulkan"

Vulkan is the more stable backend on Windows.

Install jackdaw

cargo install jackdaw once 0.4 ships on crates.io. Until then, build from source:

cargo install --git https://github.com/jbuehler23/jackdaw

The launcher will open. From there:

  1. Click + New Game.
  2. Pick a name and a folder. The default template is Game (static), which is the recommended path.
  3. The launcher scaffolds the project, builds a per-project editor binary, and opens it. The first build pulls all of bevy and takes a few minutes. Subsequent opens are fast.

Sanity check

Once the editor is open:

  1. Right-click in the outliner. Add > Cube. A brush appears in the viewport.
  2. File > Save. A file shows up at assets/scene.jsn.
  3. cargo run from the project folder. The standalone binary loads the same scene, no editor.

If those three steps work, you’re good. If they don’t, file an issue with what you tried and the error you saw. There’s a Giving Feedback page with more detail.