Are there any good sandbox alternatives to Minecraft that I don't know but should know about?
I'd like to know if there is one as a fallback plan, just in case an update to Minecraft bedrock edition becomes too prohibitive to build projects I would like to do in survival mode and the 1.20 update because of the non reusable templates it looks like the game is becoming less accessible as time goes on, which leaves me very concerned about the future development of the game and how build style survival players continue to be marginalized by elitists and ignorant fans.
I understand why some people are obsessed with the idea of balanced gameplay, the problem here is there are different playstyles of Minecraft that are conflicting with each other and what some people fail to realize is that telling people to just play creative mode or with cheats, or just adapt, is not a solution for players who still want some of the elements of vanilla survival intact, the rules they are used to in the here and now or with previous versions of the game, but are now forced to adapt or contend with a change they don't like.
When your play style is mining and combat orientated in most cases, sure, a reasonable size supply of resources can be feasibly earned without the use of trades or highly enchanted gear, but when you add building grandiose structures into the mix, it's not that simple, there are good reasons why people are defensive of mending, villager trades and what have you in order to obtain the resources they need to finish a certain build project. That's why attempts to nerf any of these features are so controversial and a compromise must be found, or all you end up doing is creating divide in the community.
But I have completely lost trust in Mojang's ability to sympathize with the issues some fans have with them or what changes they make which depending on the edition of the game you play, we can do nothing to stop them. Sure, I could play Java edition of the game, but there are good reasons why me and my friends don't, it lags too much and needs to be ran with a low render distance to compensate for the inefficiencies with how Minecraft Java works. But being on bedrock edition, it means we are in a love it or hate it situation, so in light of this, I would like to know what alternative sandboxes exist which have the survival experience me and friends look for, ones which allow you to build massive structures, but don't continue to receive griefing updates just because survival mode is being played.
Just look up open source alternatives, fangames, etc. Even some stuff on steam like blokus. My friend was working on a pokemon ish fangame he cancelled.
Just look up open source alternatives, fangames, etc. Even some stuff on steam like blokus. My friend was working on a pokemon ish fangame he cancelled.
Try things like Minetest for instance.
I read that terrain generates much deeper in Minetest as well, how does the game even begin to manage this without causing severe lag though? the chunk loading system is obviously very different from Minecraft, but it left me wondering how is this even achievable, given our experience on Minecraft.
I read that terrain generates much deeper in Minetest as well, how does the game even begin to manage this without causing severe lag though? the chunk loading system is obviously very different from Minecraft, but it left me wondering how is this even achievable, given our experience on Minecraft.
Ask TheMasterCaver about why Minecraft is so inefficient.
Ask TheMasterCaver about why Minecraft is so inefficient.
Also, vertical loading is a thing.
Indeed, there are many mods for Java Edition that simply blow away either Java or Bedrock in terms of performance and make my own optimizations look like nothing (though it must be considered that I've also added a lot of new content, which is often blamed for performance issues, and older versions are much more lightweight in the first place); in particular, it is insane to try rendering every single block when there can be millions at even moderate render distances and most games use a technique called "level of detail" to render distant features at a lower resolution - after all, at some point a single block becomes less than one pixel and details are lost even earlier:
Level-of-Detail renderer in Minecraft. Allows for render distances of millions of blocks. (Cubic Chunks-compatible) (WIP)
The implications of what the following video shows cannot be understated - say you wanted to actually load an entire world, 60x60 million blocks? That's already 3.6 quadrillion blocks per layer - 3,600,000,000,000,000 blocks! I'm guessing that at very far distances it is interpolating between points thousands of blocks apart (the overhead views do show a noticeable loss of detail but you'd normally never get such views, I'm talking like from 10 million blocks up). Also, they may not actually be rendering millions of blocks away but only 1000 or so, but making it look like it is further away due to the perspective (there are many reasons for this; if you tried rendering something very far away it would run into precision problems, as well as go outside the view frustum; you may have noticed that if you fly up high enough chunks will stop rendering since they are past the "far plane distance").
Of course, the ability to mod the game (beyond basic add-ons) is yet another major advantage that Java has that Bedrock doesn't, one that I've been relying on for nearly 10 years, and can solve the main issue you have with Java, as well as issues with changes Mojang might make (e.g. my "old anvil mechanics" mod for 1.8, one of the few mods I made for a version past 1.6.4 because while I never played on it/used it myself the inability to indefinitely repair items was a massive game-breaker for me).
Indeed, there are many mods for Java Edition that simply blow away either Java or Bedrock in terms of performance and make my own optimizations look like nothing (though it must be considered that I've also added a lot of new content, which is often blamed for performance issues, and older versions are much more lightweight in the first place); in particular, it is insane to try rendering every single block when there can be millions at even moderate render distances and most games use a technique called "level of detail" to render distant features at a lower resolution - after all, at some point a single block becomes less than one pixel and details are lost even earlier:
The implications of what the following video shows cannot be understated - say you wanted to actually load an entire world, 60x60 million blocks? That's already 3.6 quadrillion blocks per layer - 3,600,000,000,000,000 blocks! I'm guessing that at very far distances it is interpolating between points thousands of blocks apart (the overhead views do show a noticeable loss of detail but you'd normally never get such views, I'm talking like from 10 million blocks up). Also, they may not actually be rendering millions of blocks away but only 1000 or so, but making it look like it is further away due to the perspective (there are many reasons for this; if you tried rendering something very far away it would run into precision problems, as well as go outside the view frustum; you may have noticed that if you fly up high enough chunks will stop rendering since they are past the "far plane distance").
Of course, the ability to mod the game (beyond basic add-ons) is yet another major advantage that Java has that Bedrock doesn't, one that I've been relying on for nearly 10 years, and can solve the main issue you have with Java, as well as issues with changes Mojang might make (e.g. my "old anvil mechanics" mod for 1.8, one of the few mods I made for a version past 1.6.4 because while I never played on it/used it myself the inability to indefinitely repair items was a massive game-breaker for me).
Decreasing the level of detail, or as in the case of Distant Horizons, A Level of Detail mod exists to artificially increase the render distance in Minecraft Java, but it works.
I would like to see. Beyond a certain point the chunks do not need to have their full detail loaded because eventually the blocks themselves become about as large as a pixel, or not much larger than one. It's as Princess_Garnet said one time, it is diminishing returns,, which she is correct on.
To make the chunk loading more efficient I would be all for a system that adds in fake chunks beyond a certain point, while using data from the save file to determine what colors the distant blocks ought to be to give the final result.
I play Minetest. Minetest is better thought of as an engine, not a game, and out of the box it contains very little; you have to add mods for content. This is done through a menu on the Minetest launcher and mod installations are per-world. It's intended that you curate mods and construct the type of game you want to play.
Good points -
1. Terraingen is stunning, absolutely destroys Minecraft. Worlds are 60k blocks wide and 60k blocks deep. Minetest caverns can be exponentially larger than Minecraft ones.
2. Minetest is excellent for sandbox building, and you can get a good approximation of oldschool survival Minecraft experience from it if you are willing to forgive jankiness in mobs. By default it works like pre-Adventure Minecraft with no sprinting and food being insta-heal, though mods are available for those things.
3. If you decide you don't like a mod you can pull it out and your world doesn't break. Anything it added just turns to "unknown node" and then there's a tool to clean up.
Bad points -
1. My laptop runs Minecraft pretty well generally but I do experience significant lag in Minetest doing things such as opening a furnace GUI, opening a chest. I don't think this is just my setup at fault because I've observed the same in Minetest videos posted on Youtube. I do not experience any noticeable terraingen or movement lag so there's that.
2. Mobs are bad. Every mob mod I've tried, the AI is primitive, they slide around and rubberband a lot. You will not get a polished combat experience.
1. Terraingen is stunning, absolutely destroys Minecraft. Worlds are 60k blocks wide and 60k blocks deep. Minetest caverns can be exponentially larger than Minecraft ones.
There is such a thing as "too big" though; at some point a cave will be so large that it becomes meaningless as to how big it is, and impossible for any average user to ever fully explore - the largest caves in my own mod have taken me around 20 hours of extreme caving to explore (extreme as in mining upwards of 1,000 ores per hour and well over 3,000 per play session, but the average player might only get a fraction of that, considering how much they complain about gathering resources and just don't bother caving at all past the very early game).
Also, while some of my earlier mods increased the depth of the underground by as much as 3 times, or 1.5 times deeper than 1.18, I prefer something closer to the original depth (slightly deeper due to a lower lava level) since once caves get too high to reach the ceiling it takes away longer to explore them (as an illustration, I mined only 2/3 of the normal ores while exploring the largest single cave I've ever found; my highest rates are when exploring dense networks of tunnels like the ones in 1.6.4, and while they make up only about a third of the underground volume in TMCW I spend about 2/3 of the time exploring them, with a really large cave or ravine found about once a week or so; from what I've heard 1.18 is mostly giant open caves).
There's also the fact that if the ground were deeper it would take that much longer to explore a given area; many of my preferences, e.g. biome layout and hatered of the 1.7+ biome generation, are a direct result of this; some say that villages and other structures are too common but I only find one every 3 months, and so on (on average I explore about 100 chunks per play session, talking nearly half a year per level 4 map, which is "only" 2048x2048 blocks).
Likewise, a lot of people complained about "endless" caves before 1.7; individual caves/tunnels weren't that large but they were highly interconnected and a lot of players want the satisfaction of being able to fully explore a cave system (of course, my playstyle entirely revolves around exploring from one cave to the next just by following interconnections, and they are literally infinite by every measure in my mods, for vanilla 1.6.4 you have to go a good distance out away before mineshafts become common enough, but even a "smaller" network is still larger than what pretty much anybody will ever explore).
In any case, mods can fix the issues that Minecraft has; you've even said that Minetest is more of a game engine / modding platform and while not official Minecraft may as well be open-source (I have the entire source code at my disposal thanks to the developers of Mod Coder Pack who took their time to deobfuscate it; as far as updating to newer versions goes, why even bother when you can add exactly what you want, as I've been doing to nearly a decade. There are even many mods which backport features from newer versions, including just some of them, while not the ones you might not like, or just make your own mod (I know, this is too hard for most people, even I took years to get to where I am now with regards to being able to mod the game).
> a lot of players want the satisfaction of being able to fully explore a cave system
Yes, it's safer and feels more defined. A lot of Minecraft players like defined tasks and areas. Hence the preference of structures to caves in my case.
I'd look into Vintage Story. Far more complex and challenging than base Minecraft, paired with a greater emphasis on survival and natural world generation. You'll be sinking in a lot of time due to its more realistic approach toward survival gameplay, on top of its greater variety of building blocks and tools, but it's a fun time all around. Especially with friends.
It's a fun way to scratch that Minecraft-alternative itch, but I'd recommend looking into some beginner's guides first. It can be a lot to take in for Minecraft newbies. (Unless you've played some of the more technical mods like Create maybe. Or you've played Terraria. You get the picture. All-in-all an interesting experience)
Are there any good sandbox alternatives to Minecraft that I don't know but should know about?
I'd like to know if there is one as a fallback plan, just in case an update to Minecraft bedrock edition becomes too prohibitive to build projects I would like to do in survival mode and the 1.20 update because of the non reusable templates it looks like the game is becoming less accessible as time goes on, which leaves me very concerned about the future development of the game and how build style survival players continue to be marginalized by elitists and ignorant fans.
I understand why some people are obsessed with the idea of balanced gameplay, the problem here is there are different playstyles of Minecraft that are conflicting with each other and what some people fail to realize is that telling people to just play creative mode or with cheats, or just adapt, is not a solution for players who still want some of the elements of vanilla survival intact, the rules they are used to in the here and now or with previous versions of the game, but are now forced to adapt or contend with a change they don't like.
When your play style is mining and combat orientated in most cases, sure, a reasonable size supply of resources can be feasibly earned without the use of trades or highly enchanted gear, but when you add building grandiose structures into the mix, it's not that simple, there are good reasons why people are defensive of mending, villager trades and what have you in order to obtain the resources they need to finish a certain build project. That's why attempts to nerf any of these features are so controversial and a compromise must be found, or all you end up doing is creating divide in the community.
But I have completely lost trust in Mojang's ability to sympathize with the issues some fans have with them or what changes they make which depending on the edition of the game you play, we can do nothing to stop them. Sure, I could play Java edition of the game, but there are good reasons why me and my friends don't, it lags too much and needs to be ran with a low render distance to compensate for the inefficiencies with how Minecraft Java works. But being on bedrock edition, it means we are in a love it or hate it situation, so in light of this, I would like to know what alternative sandboxes exist which have the survival experience me and friends look for, ones which allow you to build massive structures, but don't continue to receive griefing updates just because survival mode is being played.
Just look up open source alternatives, fangames, etc. Even some stuff on steam like blokus. My friend was working on a pokemon ish fangame he cancelled.
Try things like Minetest for instance.
I read that terrain generates much deeper in Minetest as well, how does the game even begin to manage this without causing severe lag though? the chunk loading system is obviously very different from Minecraft, but it left me wondering how is this even achievable, given our experience on Minecraft.
Ask TheMasterCaver about why Minecraft is so inefficient.
Also, vertical loading is a thing.
Indeed, there are many mods for Java Edition that simply blow away either Java or Bedrock in terms of performance and make my own optimizations look like nothing (though it must be considered that I've also added a lot of new content, which is often blamed for performance issues, and older versions are much more lightweight in the first place); in particular, it is insane to try rendering every single block when there can be millions at even moderate render distances and most games use a technique called "level of detail" to render distant features at a lower resolution - after all, at some point a single block becomes less than one pixel and details are lost even earlier:
The implications of what the following video shows cannot be understated - say you wanted to actually load an entire world, 60x60 million blocks? That's already 3.6 quadrillion blocks per layer - 3,600,000,000,000,000 blocks! I'm guessing that at very far distances it is interpolating between points thousands of blocks apart (the overhead views do show a noticeable loss of detail but you'd normally never get such views, I'm talking like from 10 million blocks up). Also, they may not actually be rendering millions of blocks away but only 1000 or so, but making it look like it is further away due to the perspective (there are many reasons for this; if you tried rendering something very far away it would run into precision problems, as well as go outside the view frustum; you may have noticed that if you fly up high enough chunks will stop rendering since they are past the "far plane distance").
Of course, the ability to mod the game (beyond basic add-ons) is yet another major advantage that Java has that Bedrock doesn't, one that I've been relying on for nearly 10 years, and can solve the main issue you have with Java, as well as issues with changes Mojang might make (e.g. my "old anvil mechanics" mod for 1.8, one of the few mods I made for a version past 1.6.4 because while I never played on it/used it myself the inability to indefinitely repair items was a massive game-breaker for me).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Decreasing the level of detail, or as in the case of Distant Horizons, A Level of Detail mod exists to artificially increase the render distance in Minecraft Java, but it works.
I would like to see. Beyond a certain point the chunks do not need to have their full detail loaded because eventually the blocks themselves become about as large as a pixel, or not much larger than one. It's as Princess_Garnet said one time, it is diminishing returns,, which she is correct on.
To make the chunk loading more efficient I would be all for a system that adds in fake chunks beyond a certain point, while using data from the save file to determine what colors the distant blocks ought to be to give the final result.
I play Minetest. Minetest is better thought of as an engine, not a game, and out of the box it contains very little; you have to add mods for content. This is done through a menu on the Minetest launcher and mod installations are per-world. It's intended that you curate mods and construct the type of game you want to play.
Good points -
1. Terraingen is stunning, absolutely destroys Minecraft. Worlds are 60k blocks wide and 60k blocks deep. Minetest caverns can be exponentially larger than Minecraft ones.
2. Minetest is excellent for sandbox building, and you can get a good approximation of oldschool survival Minecraft experience from it if you are willing to forgive jankiness in mobs. By default it works like pre-Adventure Minecraft with no sprinting and food being insta-heal, though mods are available for those things.
3. If you decide you don't like a mod you can pull it out and your world doesn't break. Anything it added just turns to "unknown node" and then there's a tool to clean up.
Bad points -
1. My laptop runs Minecraft pretty well generally but I do experience significant lag in Minetest doing things such as opening a furnace GUI, opening a chest. I don't think this is just my setup at fault because I've observed the same in Minetest videos posted on Youtube. I do not experience any noticeable terraingen or movement lag so there's that.
2. Mobs are bad. Every mob mod I've tried, the AI is primitive, they slide around and rubberband a lot. You will not get a polished combat experience.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
There is such a thing as "too big" though; at some point a cave will be so large that it becomes meaningless as to how big it is, and impossible for any average user to ever fully explore - the largest caves in my own mod have taken me around 20 hours of extreme caving to explore (extreme as in mining upwards of 1,000 ores per hour and well over 3,000 per play session, but the average player might only get a fraction of that, considering how much they complain about gathering resources and just don't bother caving at all past the very early game).
Also, while some of my earlier mods increased the depth of the underground by as much as 3 times, or 1.5 times deeper than 1.18, I prefer something closer to the original depth (slightly deeper due to a lower lava level) since once caves get too high to reach the ceiling it takes away longer to explore them (as an illustration, I mined only 2/3 of the normal ores while exploring the largest single cave I've ever found; my highest rates are when exploring dense networks of tunnels like the ones in 1.6.4, and while they make up only about a third of the underground volume in TMCW I spend about 2/3 of the time exploring them, with a really large cave or ravine found about once a week or so; from what I've heard 1.18 is mostly giant open caves).
There's also the fact that if the ground were deeper it would take that much longer to explore a given area; many of my preferences, e.g. biome layout and hatered of the 1.7+ biome generation, are a direct result of this; some say that villages and other structures are too common but I only find one every 3 months, and so on (on average I explore about 100 chunks per play session, talking nearly half a year per level 4 map, which is "only" 2048x2048 blocks).
Likewise, a lot of people complained about "endless" caves before 1.7; individual caves/tunnels weren't that large but they were highly interconnected and a lot of players want the satisfaction of being able to fully explore a cave system (of course, my playstyle entirely revolves around exploring from one cave to the next just by following interconnections, and they are literally infinite by every measure in my mods, for vanilla 1.6.4 you have to go a good distance out away before mineshafts become common enough, but even a "smaller" network is still larger than what pretty much anybody will ever explore).
In any case, mods can fix the issues that Minecraft has; you've even said that Minetest is more of a game engine / modding platform and while not official Minecraft may as well be open-source (I have the entire source code at my disposal thanks to the developers of Mod Coder Pack who took their time to deobfuscate it; as far as updating to newer versions goes, why even bother when you can add exactly what you want, as I've been doing to nearly a decade. There are even many mods which backport features from newer versions, including just some of them, while not the ones you might not like, or just make your own mod (I know, this is too hard for most people, even I took years to get to where I am now with regards to being able to mod the game).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
> a lot of players want the satisfaction of being able to fully explore a cave system
Yes, it's safer and feels more defined. A lot of Minecraft players like defined tasks and areas. Hence the preference of structures to caves in my case.
No, there are no alternatives to minecraft (java edition).
And yes I play on low render distance aswell most of the times, it's okay. You don't need high render distance most of the time.
Install mods if you want another minecraft experience, we have done it this way for a decade.
Check out my Youtube-Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@VanillaLongplayz
I'd look into Vintage Story. Far more complex and challenging than base Minecraft, paired with a greater emphasis on survival and natural world generation. You'll be sinking in a lot of time due to its more realistic approach toward survival gameplay, on top of its greater variety of building blocks and tools, but it's a fun time all around. Especially with friends.
It's a fun way to scratch that Minecraft-alternative itch, but I'd recommend looking into some beginner's guides first. It can be a lot to take in for Minecraft newbies. (Unless you've played some of the more technical mods like Create maybe. Or you've played Terraria. You get the picture. All-in-all an interesting experience)
SPRUcE