Notch's ambitious 0x10c concepts detailed

Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson has revealed a series of ideas he's tinkering with for his upcoming space adventure-sim-thing 0x10c.

Perhaps the game's most unique aspect is that you can actually program your ship's 16-bit brain. It sounds baffling for plebes like me who can't code worth a damn, but Notch ensured that it will be accessible to newcomers.

"I'm trying to design the game so you don't have to know programming but you can share the code," said Notch in an interview with PC Gamer. "If you have a friend who's made this really awesome docking algorithm, you can put that on a floppy disk within the game and put that into your computer."

Yes, docking is an actual mechanic. The game world will be so enormous that you'll actually be able to fly to - and land on - planets in real-time. (Okay, maybe not real-time real-time as that would take dozens of years, but you know what I mean). Your control over the ship will be so detailed that even the tiniest hazard will require repairs. And as you'd expect with a hulking piece of metal somehow supporting people in space, things will go wrong a lot.

"I'd really like for stuff to go wrong," said developer Mojang's Tobias Möllstam. "But I think we've managed to establish a philosophy where things can go wrong and we're not going to judge too much. Like you run something at 120 per cent and catches fire, but you just about make it. It's kind of cheesy but I like it."

"The goal is to have it feel a bit like Firefly," Notch explained. "You can try to land on a planet but you mess up and, instead of having the ship just explode like it would in real life, the landing gear gets broken. Then you have to try to fix that by finding resources. Instead of the adventure being flying from here to here, it's: I set the destination, oh god I hit a small asteroid and the cloaking device broke."

"The idea is if the gravity generator crashes and you accelerate, you kind of get pushed backwards. If you get hit by something, everything can go 'Bonk!' You have wires, you have attachment parts that kind of hang down, so you can see [the effects of gravity and inertia] in how the wires hang."

He further noted Alien as an inspiration insofar as the ship will have a lot of personality and it will focus more on what it's like to be inside a ship rather than simply watching the vessel from outside.

Elsewhere Notch confirmed that he'll add multiplayer to Ox10c "as soon as it's fun."

"Right now it's not multiplayer at all, I'm just trying to figure out the actual mechanics for it," he explained. "Nothing in the game is fun right now. I need to figure out what is actually a fun game mechanic in all of this."

0x10c is quite a ways off then, but a real-time first-person space sim is certainly an intriguing process and we hope it comes together. In the meantime, check out some newly released early footage showing off more of the ship's interior.

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