Introduction

Welcome to native Bedrock modding!

This beginner's guide will walk you through creating your first native Bedrock mod. First, you should understand a few basic concepts about native moddding.

Most articles in this wiki will assume that you understand programming, and at least have a basic understanding of C++, the language Bedrock Edition is written in. If you don't know C++, you should learn the basics of the language first.

What's a Native Mod?

Unlike addons, native mods directly interface with Minecraft's memory and code. This (theoretically) gives you full control over everything happening inside the game.

Where Do Native Mods Run?

Native Bedrock mods mostly run on Windows 10/11, on x64 processors. It's possible to mod Bedrock Edition on Android and Linux, but this is not yet documented on this wiki.

This guide will only work on 64-bit Windows.

What's a DLL?

Native mods typically run their code inside the game's process (often called internal modding). This is done by compiling the code into a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) and injecting it into the game with a DLL injector.

What's a Hook?

Hooks are what you use to modify the game's inner workings. Most functions in the game can be hooked. When you hook a function, you redirect calls to that function to your own code, effectively replacing the function's code with your own.

Hooking is usually provided by a hooking library. The recommended choices are MinHook and SafetyHook. MinHook is simpler and more beginner friendly, while SafetyHook has more features and a more advanced API.

In this guide, we will be using MinHook.

What's a Signature?

The location of every function in Minecraft changes when the game updates; however, the machine code comprising these functions remains largely unchanged. To find functions in a way that's more likely to survive updates, we use signatures.

Fundamentally, signatures are just patterns that match specific sequences of bytes that we want to locate. Their syntax looks like this: 48 8D 05 ? ? ? ? 49 89 04 24 49 8D 8C 24

NOTE

Signatures are also sometimes called patterns, byte patterns, or an array of bytes.

Where Do I Start?

Now that you've learned some basic concepts about native modding, you're ready to start the guide! In the next page, you'll set up an appropriate development environment.