Lactose Free – Cooperative Woodcraft VR

Relaxing cooperative VR sandbox on a tiny island where you and your friends cut trees, mill logs, paint wood and build cozy houses together on Meta Quest.

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Inspiration

I wanted to build a cozy cooperative sandbox for Meta Quest where players don’t rush to win, but just relax together, work with their hands, and slowly shape a shared place. Woodworking felt like a perfect theme: everyone understands cutting a tree, sawing logs and building a cabin, and it works very well with VR hand interactions.

Lactose Free is my solo, open-source side project: a peaceful island where you and your friends can turn trees into houses together.

What you do in Lactose Free

Players spawn on a tiny island. Using VR tools, you can:

  • explore and terraform the environment
  • cut trees and harvest logs
  • process wood into smaller pieces
  • paint and decorate parts
  • assemble everything into cozy wooden structures together

The focus is on cooperation and physical interaction: you see your friends’ avatars, hands, and tools, and you can literally watch them work on their own projects next to you.

How it’s built

Lactose Free is built with Unity 6.1 (6000.1.3f1) and Universal Render Pipeline (URP), targeting Meta Quest headsets.

Core technologies include:

  • Photon Fusion 2 in Shared mode for low-latency cooperative networking
  • Unity OpenXR + Meta OpenXR + Meta XR Platform SDK for VR support and social features
  • XR Interaction Toolkit for hand interactions, teleportation and locomotion
  • A custom voxel / marching-cubes based terrain system for terraforming
  • Addressables-based asset management for optimized loading on Quest

The project is open source under the AGPLv3 license and currently developed by a single developer.

Significant update for the Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition

Before this competition build, the public alpha on the Meta Horizon Store was essentially a single-player sandbox: other players’ avatars could be seen, but their tools, actions and the world state were not synchronized.

For the competition, I implemented a full cooperative woodworking loop using Photon Fusion Shared:

  • players can see when friends grab tools (axe, saw, paint tool, etc.)
  • tree cutting, log processing, painting and placement are all synchronized
  • the resulting wooden pieces and houses live in a shared world state visible to everyone in real time

This turns Lactose Free from a solo toy into a true social experience.

Challenges and next steps

The main challenges were keeping the networking smooth on Meta Quest (authority transfer, interpolation of physics objects, lag when grabbing) while preserving comfort in VR. I iterated a lot on Fusion settings and object ownership to keep the experience stable.

Next steps include: more woodworking tools, richer terraforming, persistent shared islands, and lightweight progression systems to give long-term goals while keeping the experience calm and welcoming.

Built With

  • addressables
  • c#
  • meta-openxr
  • meta-xr-platform-sdk
  • photon-fusion-2-(shared-mode)
  • unity-6.1-(6000.1.3f1)
  • unity-openxr
  • universal-render-pipeline-(urp-17.1.0)
  • xr-interaction-toolkit-3.1.1
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