by Doc – Owner, Founder, Curious to See If This Is More Than a Flash in The Pan
Short Answer
Basically, you run two entire games at the same time and a mod lets them swap data, so they act like one game. That’s the whole trick.
Long Answer
A normal mod edits one game’s files or code. With passthrough, both games keep running as themselves, and the mod sits in the middle passing things like collisions and visuals back and forth so the gameplay is visibly affected by the mechanics of the other. I don’t have enough info on exactly how this works so that’s all I have for you now.
For Example…
Tobyn Jacobs showed Minecraft running inside Elden Ring, with Steve swinging a sword at Lands Between enemies while the hotbar, hunger and armor bars sit on screen. He says all 1,600 items, working redstone and Creative Mode made the trip too. There’s no download or release date yet, so take it as a demo for now.
Chasm has a mod that reads data from Minecraft and Skyrim running together. Skyrim’s collision data wins, but a block you place overwrites it, and your Minecraft sword swings deal damage in Skyrim.
Over on X people are posting Tarkov mechanics in Skyrim, Minecraft movement in GTA V, Call of Duty: World at War Zombies mixed with Mario Kart, and Mario firing bullets at Master Chief. Yes, really.
No, It’s Not Re/Decompilation, But That’s Cool Too
I keep seeing these lumped in with decompilation, and they’re related but different. Tools like N64: Recompiled turn old game binaries into code that runs natively on modern hardware, which makes games far easier to pull apart (and some projects already have source code to lean on). Recomp makes games moddable, passthrough is more of a category of modding that’s specific to the two games.
Still Need to Research
I’m not entirely sure how the games stay in sync, because nobody’s explained the timing and setup, and most of this is clips rather than releases with some commentary that I need to watch. So… file it under “very cool, unverified.” I’ve reached out to chasm for an interview to get more facts, by the way.
