After more than 7 years of development with nothing to show for it, Riot cancels the Minecraft-inspired sandbox RPG Hytale and closes the studio making it
Vintage Story is basically... what if Minecraft had many, many more layers of realism and complexity to its world sim systems, and then also had a whole lot larger of a beastiary with Lovecraftian origins?
It is also largely open source, though it does cost money, a whole lot of its subsystems and essentially modding tools are just opensource.
Its current state isn't even close to being done. VS has a roadmap that is just as large as Schedule I or All Will Fall.
And VS has a modding API, unlike MC, or so I am told. I played MC for all of about two hours years ago. I thought that the graphics were the issue. Turns out it was that the gameplay loop was lacking in depth
I am always astounded that more people don't know about Vintage Story, it is the creme de la creme of basically Minecraft knock-offs... but it is one of the few that rises above being just a knock-off and is actually legitimately its own, better thing... when there are so many knock-offs that are more or less a shitty remake with a twist, done by incompetent developers.
If anyone is unsure about it and owns Minecraft, check out the TerraFirmaCraft mod. Vintage Story and TerraFirmaCraft are both based off the VintageCraft mod afaik
Was just about to recommend this. Really wish I could get a server of people playing it. Single player is ROUGH. It takes so much time and effort to build cool stuff in survival and there's just not enough time to gather all the raw resources in a day.
My biggest complaint is resources is far to scarce. My first map i had to abandon because it took me litterally 4 hours walking to find the nearest limestone. The scarcness would be ok for large servers that can support a trade economy. But in a single player world, all the resources needs to available within atleast 1k blocks of any single point. Minecraft solves this be distributing most of the resources within a chunk and only change their distribution based on their depth.
And just like that another Minecraft killer goes the way of the dodo, what a shame. Hytale really did look promising too, can’t believe after all this time we didn’t even get a second trailer :(
Dragon Quest Builders (2) attempted something between RPG and minecraft-style building, and at least it released. It looks pretty good for a blocky game, it has spectacular block and item diversity, and great building tools. As a mostly creative game with a bunch of silly NPC villager interactions, it's fun.
Unfortunately, there's only the hint of a great base/town builder in there, but it's too shallow in the end. You've got different classes of NPC villagers with needs and skills, but there's no challenge, only the satisfaction of seeing your town run sort of well.
Story mode also teaches you to build defenses and traps against monster attacks but monster raids are scripted and very dumb. After the story ends and you get into full free build mode, you'll never have a monster raid again, making it all basically useless.
And also there's very little procedural gen in the game. Main islands are big, but static. Small islands are procedural each with a set biome, but their primary goal is to be destroyed for materials. You can only save 3 of them to use them as (small-ish) new landmasses for your builds.
No, i just saw (some of) what they released to the public. The biggest red flag was the engine change, but before that they talked about redoing all of the generation.
Let's just realize that these are not what make a good unique game:
Minecraft but better
Minecraft but not Java
Many games of course have minecraft like elements, that work, they just do try to be their own things:
FortressCraft Evolved: Voxel factory game with tower defence elements
Colony Survival: Voxel building game where you protect and grow a colony
Moving away from games with Voxel building for those that "want better graphics" you have games like
Valheim - build/adventure.
ARK: Survival Evolved - build/adventure/poop jokes (sorry never got into the game the let's play poop jokes got old for me)
Also might add there are minecraft aspects to the 2d games, but most have unique gameplay as well
Factorio
Stardew Valley
Terraria - I really should like this.. But every time I try it I don't
None of these are "Minecraft killers" because while they may allow for some sandbox play they are unique games. Same for some others I see in this thread.
Sure you have Luanti as well if you want to make a highly modded minecraft like, or just other voxel game to play test, and maybe prove why its better. But it never tried to replace minecraft.