Your Semi Annual Reminder That MCprep Needs You

As we close in on getting the next MCprep update ready for release, I think it’s a good time to add to my growing collection^{1 2} of posts where I try to get more involvement in MCprep development. By involvement, I mostly mean the following:

• Bug reports
• Assets
• Translations (new one since the last time I’ve talked about this issue)
• Code

Bug reports are (thankfully) filed more often these days, and with a lot more detail (though after we moved to the forms format on GitHub), so there’s not really much for me to say other than “please file more when you get an issue with MCprep”.

Assets are, well still very little submissions. To be fair, we do have a preference towards using 2.8 (and now 2.83) for rig submissions for backwards compatibility reasons, but there really hasn’t been many submissions for rigs/assets so far. This is one area that we leave up to the community, and unfortunately, we don’t get much involement in this area. For those interested, here’s what we’re looking for in rig submissions; a great place to get started would be creating replacements for BSS rigs.

Like assets, translations are also another thing we leave up to the community. This is a more recent addition, and we do have 2 translations already in MCprep (Simplified Chinese and Russian). Translation is not really easy, and we do require all translations to be reviewed for quality reasons, so I’m not too surprised we don’t get much involvement in this area. For those interested in translation, you can check out the docs for more info.

And finally, code. Code is something that, while we really do wish we had more community involvement with, we also understand why it’s not common. However, I do think it’s important to at least give some stats and figures for the MCprep codebase.

Running sloccount on MCprep yields us the following:

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(Data up till commit f8fafd8cb30e97c5a65e75f55bf2df53b9abe323)
2

3
Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 16,837
4
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 3.88 (46.54)
5
 (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
6
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)                         = 0.90 (10.76)
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 (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
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Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule)  = 4.33
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Total Estimated Cost to Develop                           = $ 523,865
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 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

As of June 2025, MCprep is 16,837 lines of Python (and yes, this is only counting the Python code), and assuming a salary of around 56,000 USD³ would have “costed” around 523,860 USD (rounding the numbers here). Of course, this stat assumes we were paid to work on MCprep, which we aren’t, as MCprep is completely free software under the GNU GPL⁴.

And speaking of “us”, we also can’t forget stats broken down by dev.

For context, the MCprep dev team (i.e. those who can review and merge pull requsts) consists of:

• TheDuckCow (who has been working on MCprep for almost 12 years now)
• zNight
• And of course, myself

Y’all might notice that there’s a bit of a recent falloff in the stats for us three, and that’s for a couple of reasons. These include new projects (such as TheDuckCow’s game Wheel Steal, as well as the road generation plugin that powers it), work on other open source projects (zNight for example has done a lot of recent work for Bforartists, which funnily enough I’m also a part of for packaging the Flatpak), and life changes (such as myself entering university). Of course, there’s also the aspect that, until Blender 5.0 entered alpha recently, MCprep didn’t really break as much in the last year with new releases. Sure, that doesn’t mean we completely forgot about MCprep and adding features⁵, but new features additions have slowed down in MCprep.

For those intersted in contributing to MCprep, we have written a basic guide on contributing to MCprep. If you need some ideas for what to contribute, we also have a few GitHub issues marked as First good contribution, i.e. bugs and features that would make good first contributions to MCprep. A lot of these are bugs, but there’s also some features in there, like #264 and #268.

So get out there and start getting involved :D