Minecraft Re-Imagined

This post is an early attempt at brainstorming various ways that voxel construction games can evolve from the Minecraft formula in small or large ways.

• Minecraft Reimagined
• Official Minecraft DLCs

The Existing Game

The existing game is more like a starting point of a game which can then take on different forms. Players' choices can transform the game itself.

Not a lot in the existing game needs to change. A player can choose to develop more technologies and complexities, or just stay content with the game as it is. Such an approach is a key aspect of Minecraft in general. As of right now, the player can choose whether to go to the Nether, or to the End, or the player can stay in the upper world. - There's no pressure. However, once you open up certain possibilities, they might take you into challenging situations.

The existing game contains landmark events - especially discovering new biomes, settlements, dungeons, and exciting new realities like the Nether and End.

New Game Aspects

As usual, the game starts the player out with nothing. You are in survival mode. You are by yourself. You scavenge. You mine. You hunt. Then you stake out a home. You tame animals. You grow crops. Then you explore. Then you find or stake out a new settlement. You trade. Then you build a town with walls.

Next, you plan and build a city. Cities consist of a minimal set of specific buildings and some form of city wall with outlying farms. Your first city, you must build yourself.

Then you can learn and teach automation and delegation in the educational institutions you build in your first city. You can then build more towns and cities. You build roads like the Romans. You connect settlements and cities with trade routes, charge tolls, police crime along the roads, or not. Connected roads facilitate multiple new types of game play, like street vending, wheeled carts and wagons, mail/communication services, etc.

After you connect multiple towns and/or cities with roads, then you start dealing with new problems like revolts and then foreign relations. Perhaps you conquer and build an Empire. Perhaps you find peaceful means to do so. You test peoples' limits or you win friends and allies. Perhaps you build ships, and explore new territories.

The main incentive to expand is to be able to mine, harvest, refine and trade materials from different biomes. Transporting materials after they are refined in their respective biome is much more efficient than trying to ship them first and then refine them in a central location. Thus the training and buildings required to refine those materials will require separate settlements and cities around those resources.

Finally, you can spurn an industrial age by designing and constructing buildings that allow you to refine materials to another layer of advancement. These buildings act as functions that have inputs and outputs, and ship materials between them to finally produce what you design.

Almost all of the time in the game, you have to learn something yourself first, and even wallow in the process of doing it manually, before you can automate it or delegate it. The game forces you to do this because there are items required in order to accomplish those things on a larger scale. Those items can only be acquired as needed with lots of personal investment in those manual activities initially.

Along the Way

Along the way, you develop, and invent new and better technologies to become more economical. Perhaps some technologies you discover, but only later learn how to build yourself. There are old ways of doing things, but then much later you might learn much faster, better ways of doing the same things. You destroy or preserve - desecrate or beautify - the environment.

Like in Warcraft or Starcraft, buildings have several types of upgrades that can only be achieved by augmenting them. In Minecraft, this will involve special relics you find and/or specially refined items you produce. Generally, these items can only be produced as a consequence of combining other items made with the previous level of buildings and developing automation processes. Thus players cannot skip ahead quickly.

Despite all of this, players can enter creative mode at any point. As now, players can design and build anything in creative mode. However in survival mode, the player must wait to build something for when they have developed the automation and refinement tech to include certain blocks in more advanced buildings.

Do you want a moving map to tell you where you are? You must first work up to building a large sensor tower, or even a satellite that can be launched into space. Perhaps you need to build a digital device for you arm, or a visor for you eyes, such that a screen would make the satellite map available to you.

Do you want to fast-travel to different locations? You must first build something, and place it in other locations to be able to fast-travel there. This should only become available to a player after building rails and roads has been incredibly crucial to success in previous tasks. Even then, it does not become available to the wider public of npcs - only human players.

Do you want to automate building? You must first build a town and settle it. Then you must build a series of production buildings and training facilities. Finally, you must assign trained settlers to tasks you define in graphical algorithms. Perhaps this requires a special boss headquarters building itself.

Aliens

Aliens make anything better, including Minecraft. The new game additions would include the discovery of alien ships containing items that greatly catalyze the player's technological developments. Redstone would continue to play an important role in these technologies. It might be the very resource that the aliens were coming for.

Perhaps alien ships would contain transporters to an alien world. These transporters would need to be activated before they could work.

Ancient Magic 

Ancient magic zones, buildings, and relics should continue to play a role in development. Perhaps a pathway alternate to industrial development would be to develop magical capabilities to guard cities and augment settlers' skills like alchemy and enchanting. Perhaps instead of ship building and mechanical devices, magic-focused buildings/cities would summon dragons and beasts for defense, as with the golems.

Magic versus Technology

Perhaps one player would develop technologically themed buildings and manufacturing, while another player would develop magically themed buildings and cities. In the same way that a game like Warcraft has different races who use Orc tech or Human tech, Minecraft could include different pathways of techniques.

One example of this is the use of a magical light emitting orbs instead of animals to propel carts and ships. These orbs are powered by magic, but they can be used in mechanical devices to power and move them. They can also be trained to work with customized algorithms.

Balancing Creative versus Controlled Gameplay

Minecraft is a kids' game. Nothing is supposed to be that difficult. However in a perfect Minecraft, you would be able to get further, bigger, and grander via ingenuity and creativity. Yes, perhaps there are default building designs with set types of augmentations. However there should also be aspects of construction that would be greatly customizable and augmented through various other means.

Minimal qualifications of a building to reach some status would encourage structures that could be beautified and personalized in various ways. For example, towers might be functionally necessary in order to make blocks around one area indestructible. In the case of the example in my previous blog post on this, I mentioned 100 blocks of depth to be the optimal distance between a solar collector crystal and a redstone laser emitter. Such a parameter might encourage different strategies of building, which would then encourage different building styles as well. Perhaps one player would prefer a quick and easy tower to quickly set up defense of an area. They could slowly augment it to be more armored over time. Perhaps another player would search for higher ground such that only a short, hidden tower would be necessary. Yet other players would build a more robust tower to begin with. Similar choices can be made with initial numbers of mirror cubes and aspects of their positioning. In other words, the parameters of every given building demands that the player make decisions about materials, processes, and aesthetics. Also, decisions about relative locations to other buildings or block types might make a difference.

This idea creates directed pathways for gameplay, but in the process, it also encourages personalized technique. Even after such techniques become implemented to their fullest relevance to game functionality, a builder will still be able to further express him/her self through additional visual augmentations and touches.

Just as in Elder Scrolls, combining ingredients produces certain effects, perhaps in Minecraft, implementing block combinations in a significant building would enhance specific effects in that building. (In order for this to work, buildings' dimensions and purposes have to be defined by a corner stone block.)