HousingEditor in Alpha Testing

A fresh start, new features, and alpha testing!

The HousingEditor

2645 people. That’s the size of an entire concert crowd or even a small town. It’s also the number of HousingEditor users since July 2022.

I’m delighted to see so many people excited about HousingEditor over the last three years! Many of you have saved precious hours of time coding Houses.

But it’s almost 2026 now (wild) I wrote HousingEditor code right after 9th grade with no real programming knowledge, motivated by the time-consuming and monotonous Housing GUIs. It took all summer to get HousingEditor to a point I was proud of and then I bought the domain housingeditor.com. Over the years, people enjoyed block coding and our community grew.

• 2645 users
• 8815 projects created
• 100,000+ views on so many community tutorials and YouTube videos

Thank You!

Over time, the coding and developer community in Housing has grown tremendously, and truly outpaced me. Today, derivatives of HousingEditor and other amazing tools to aid coding in Housing have emerged. Since then, I’ll sadly admit I haven’t maintained HousingEditor very well; there’ve only been a few updates since 2022. Life gets busy, and motivation on large projects can fade (I’m a bad developer).

Continuing on the old codebase would have only accumulated years of technical debt and inevitable burnout. In the meantime, I’ve written and debugged thousands of lines of code on various projects, studied algorithms, practiced kata problems, and learned design principles. I was seeing all the feedback from the community which gave me a deep love for programming. Today, I’m a university student studying computer science (we can thank HousingEditor for a $2,000 scholarship).

It’s time to give back with a fresh start for HousingEditor.

What’s New?

We’re starting simple with three new features: Hologram Art Generator, Cheatsheets, and an NBS to HTSL converter.

Hologram Art Generator

Holograms (floating text) can be layered to create ASCII art. This tool lets you generate Hologram art from an image and preview it before importing it into Housing.

A few settings to adjust to your liking:

• Width: Width of the hologram art in characters. (4 characters = 1 block wide)
• Dither Type: Select the dithering algorithm to simulate more colors.
• Palette: Choose from 2 to 85 unique colors.
• Color Distance Formula: Determines how image colors map to Minecraft ones.
• Compact Mode: Use a Hologram every 2 blocks (less holograms) or every block (more detail and lag).

When you like the preview, copy the hologram lines ingame.

This classic Minecraft painting looks great, I think it will be a nice addition to my house!

You can select the “Mixed Colors” palette to achieve a dynamic range of 85 colors by layering the 16 Minecraft colors!

NBS to HTSL Converter (Music Maker)

This tool existed previously on my personal website but now it’s on HousingEditor!

Choose an NBS file to convert to HTSL code. Change settings to further optimize and customize the output.

Cheatsheets

As you may have seen, a few cheatsheets for Housing have already been added. It’s like a Housing wiki.

Many Housing wiki’s and forum tutorials have been attempted in the past. These are useful but they tend to become outdated and abandoned over time as Housing evolved. Tutorials are frequently inconsistent with formatting, style, and structure. I’ve seen tutorials using various styles for code snippets, some use HTSL, others use pseudocode, or just plain english.

Theres already a growing demand for more clear, concise, and in-depth tutorials and references. Housing is getting complex with new actions, events, functions!

HousingEditor can accomplish these issues with custom documentation:

• Embed custom components into guides that display GUIs, items, HTSL code blocks, and block coding snippets.
• Allow copying examples into a HousingEditor project.
• Make consistent style and formatting.
• Remove repetitive fluff (background info) in guides by linking to a cheatsheet.

The long term goal is to create a comprehensive, up-to-date library with Housing tutorials and resources for creators. This includes “tutorial” style guides (e.g “How to make a Deathrun minigame”) and technical documentation (e.g “How Teams work in Housing”).

But it’s a big task and we need your help and advice to build cheatsheets. There are two options:

Open Contributions

Cheatsheets could be open to community contributions. Similar to how most traditional wikis work. Anyone can create or update tutorials. Although, it may be hard to motivate people and maintain quality.

Reward System

Another idea we’re considering is introducing a bounty-style rewards system to encourage high-quality guides. Contributors to guides could earn Hypixel ranks, Housing+, and extra Housing Slots (or equivalent) for creating high quality cheatsheets and how-to’s. Smaller contributions would receive perks like early access to HousingEditor features or the ability advertise your house in the discord.

Essentially a Discord channel would list available bounties. You could also submit ideas for guides, e.g. “How to make a Deathrun minigame on Housing” with some context on the tutorial. Then the submission would be reviewed and we can plan the guide and decide a fair reward. Finally the guide can be developed — individually or with friends — and submitted for review, then awarded and published.

To help aid writers, there would be style guidelines and templates for adding HTSL, images, or alerts such as this:

Documentation pages would focus on specific Housing features like Teams, Functions, Custom Menus. Listings would include what to cover, what to research, and the reward.

To put a concrete example to this idea:

Also, if you needed me to custom code a mini “tool” (e.g. that generates HTSL) for your guide we could totally do that.

The prizes are small compared to the amount of effort to create a full, polished tutorial (which could take days!) It would just be a nice way to improve your Housing skills, gain recognition as an author (self-promo allowed), and get rewarded for it. You can always just write a guide on the side of normally creating a house and showcase your development process.

Nobody can be an expert on everything, but we can get all the experts together to create some amazing guides. Even just a few thought-out guides (development process, how to’s, HTSL tutorials) and some well-researched cheatsheet pages (Teams, Functions, NPCs) would make a huge positive impact for the Housing community!

A Fresh Start

The new codebase is built with modern web technologies like SvelteKit, TypeScript, and TailwindCSS. You should expect the website to feel snappy and comfortable to use. I’m putting an emphasis on UI/UX design. I genuinely want this to be consistent and easy to use for you.

I’ve also been researching how to structure the codebase so it can be maintained and built upon, because I have aspirations for the future of HousingEditor. The old codebase was a pile of spaghetti. It “did” it’s job, but good riddance.

Alpha Testers

Alpha Testing is live! We’re looking for active Housing players to help spot bugs and share feedback on new features. Alpha testers will receive first access to awesome upcoming tools.

Join the Discord server where I’ll be accepting alpha testers.

Future Plans

I typically don’t like to make promises I can’t keep, (I learned my lesson with Music Maker a few years ago.) But expect the next development updates for HousingEditor to focus on bug fixes, account profiles, and the beginning of HousingEditor Studio (Don’t tell anyone 🤫).

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all fellow Housing Developers who helped with code, feedback, and support.

If you want to help, please join the Discord server