Minecraft Clones
 

I've recently delved into the world of Minecraft clones, also known as voxel games. This thread will be dedicated to giving a few of them a shout out, as a few I've seen look incredible and show promise. I will be listing them in separate posts to keep the topic less cluttered.

Latura

Created by the makers of the Evil Minecraft mod, Latura is already showing quite a bit of promise, even though it is only in an early Alpha.

Latura is a voxel-based sandbox game currently in development by Adanac Entertainment, focused around allowing the player to create and destroy, survive harsh terrains and explore amazing landscapes. You can use advance your technology using the resources available to you in order to invent and forge new creations. Inspired by games such as Minecraft, Infiniminer, Spore and Dwarf Fortress, Latura puts not only the world - but also the universe - at your fingertips. What will you do with it?


CREATE.
Latura, aiming to provide something for near enough every 'type' of gamer, will have a creative mode. This mode is for people who truly want to play with something that can be called a sandbox - having ultimate freedom and control over whatever they wish. Through the use of having everything available - there's much more to being creative than just building a house or castle(but castles are still cool!). Feel like completely ruining a world's climate? Go ahead!

The creative mode tools go beyond just placing and destroying blocks - we hope to introduce a large range of tools that allow players to truly be creative. Want to place a 4x4x4 chunk of explosives? Want to easily place downloaded / pre-made buildings in your world? Want to start a war between two races, fighting over a piece of cake? Go ahead - the universe is your toy.


SURVIVE.
It all starts out simple. You wake up, make yourself some tools, go hunting, and maybe explore a little bit. You'll have to pay attention to your hunger, thirst, energy, and health - all while worrying about the world(and universe) that, for a large part, seems to be out to get you. Survival, however, goes far beyond that. As with the human race, survival has pushed the bounds of knowledge, technology, and exploration.

You'll eventually reach a point being the sole sentient being isn't viable, perhaps finding another wandering soul in the middle of nowhere, or stumbling across a village. Things will take their own course - you could end up being a tyrannic king, or just a humble adventurer looking for the next monster to kill or innocent villager to save. Through advancements in technology, survival turns into something for your entire race - the water on your world will no doubt eventually run thin. Resources aren't unlimited, meaning players will be forced out of their comfort zone, exploring the depths of space to simply survive. Survival takes a much different role than players would perhaps be used to, as they fight pirates in space in order to save a shipment of water to keep a colony alive.


ADVENTURE.
For the players that like to become involved in stories, adventuring, and exploring - our adventure mode is perfect for them. This mode will not only contain stories and adventures created by members of our team, but it will also contain a way for players to create, share, and download their owns stories and maps in an easy-to-use environment. This allows players to have an incredibly large range of content to play in this mode alone, with more and more being added as time goes on.


Events and Player Involvement
In Latura, making the player become involved in their world(and the rest of the universe) is incredibly important. To help achieve this while still making the core survival gameplay a sandbox, we're going to be introducing an events system to the game. We don't want to reveal too many details on this yet, but here are a couple of examples of events that could possibly happen:
A war between two factions / races breaks out. Depending on your stances with the two, you could be dragged into the war on either side.
A necromancer in a village raises the dead from the local graveyard.


The Universe(SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!)
Latura, as mentioned previously, doesn't contain you to a single world. The universe is at your fingertips, all you need to do is find a way to travel around and explore. Many planets will be like your homeworld - which is much like Earth - having polar ice caps, an equator, and biomes to make things interesting. Others, however, will fit the term 'alien' perfectly. From your home world, however, you'll be able to access the "Underworld" simply by digging downwards. Through use of a 'magic' skill set, there will be skylands accessible as well.

Space travel will be in the game, as well as space combat. If Latura does get on Steam, we'll see what we can do about adding space cores.


Modding, Community Content, and You!
With Latura, we're aiming to make modding as easily accessible as we possibly can. We will be including a mod API early on(not from the very start, but we're building the game so that the API can be easily created), as well as licensing the source out to serious modders. We hope for everything in the game to be moddable, and soon after the inclusion of the API we aim to add an in-game mod / texture browser. We hope for community content to be an important part of this game, and any input / suggestions regarding how it all should be dealt with is greatly appreciated.


More information!
The game is still in early development, having only started around two and a half months ago, and we've released the early alpha. If you'd like more information, head over to the Latura site.


Latura

I've tried Latura, and at the current state, it is so unoptimized that it is unplayable on my laptop. It doesn't seem to be doing much. I'm going to chalk it up to it being an early alpha and I hope the performance issues get ironed out months later.

That said, the web site is completely broken on Internet Explorer, and it's not Internet Explorer that is messing up.

There is a Minecraft clone on the Kindle Fire App Market that my younger sister downloaded called Mooncraft. The app's icon is just a Creeper icon so it's a VERY obvious Minecraft clone. It's very hard to find any visuals of this though I'm finding since there is another clone called Mooncraft as well but it's actually based on the moon. The Kindle Fire App that I'm refering to is exactly like Minecraft except with AwFUL controls as it uses the motion sensor in the device to move the camera, so you tilt it around, not to mention it's hyper sensitive. To move, you use a control pad shown on the screen. No options to change it either... it's just bad.

Found a really incredible looking one.

Blockscape

Blockscape is the next generation voxel sandbox game. You play in a computer generated world made out of blocks.

http://www.blockscape.com

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Blockscape is currently in phase 1 and in open beta.

Phase 1 is the world of blockscape. It is the environment you play in. All the trees, mountains, rivers, caves and all the blocks that they are made of. It is the tools you use to shape the world. It is the rules for how things works.
Phase 2 will contain actual gaming modes (Defence, RPG/Survival and God)
Phase 3 is a secret.

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Game modes:
Defense Mode
The first true 3d tower defense game. Yes, there are some tower defense games that use 3d engines but the gameplay is still 2d (you build towers in a 2d grid). In Blockscape the actual gameplay will be 3d. You build in a 3d grid and enemies can move on walls and ceilings.
God Mode
Right now it is just a mode where you don't need to mine to gather resources and you also have the abillity to fly.
In the future I plan to add features that will make it work more like a house/village/city/world simulation.
Survival/RPG
Survival/RPG game of epic proportions.


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Preliminary release date for the survival game type is set to December 15.

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If you want to try out the very latest build of Blockscape or discuss the game with other users then please join the forum at forum.blockscape.com.


This looks amazing. The "blocks" are really small, which can lead to immense detail. The graphics are also very stunning, like Minecraft run off the Steam engine.

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/57...DB787F3575EB2/
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/...4D53A8693BF53/
http://victoryroad.net/picture.php?a...pictureid=8545

I would like to leave a tip here for all 360 owners to steer clear of FortressCraft. It has severe glitches that could possibly overheat your Xbox, not to mention how incredibly broken the controls are and how easy it is to recreate the Biblical Flood.

On the other hand, Total Miner: Forge is worth taking a look into. The interface is bad, though.

i had total miner since it was released i never know it would be so populer
wow