Markus Persson’s put a name and a description to the Elite-inspired space game he’s been teasing Twitter about recently, and it’s pretty obvious this is going to be a full-fat endeavour rather than another micro-project. 0x10c is the game’s name, how it’s pronounced is anyone’s guess but I’m gonna go with ‘Derek’. It’s a reference to a programming error that caused space travellers (from an alternate 1988 where the space race hadn’t ended) going into deep sleep to stay under for billions of years.



Quoth Derek’s website, “It’s now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy.”

0x10c appears to be two-handed offering: in one, space travel, combat, mining, looting, planet-hopping and a multiverse economy. In the other, an in-game computer with “a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish.” Which, if you squint, makes this boldly going where no Notch has gone before a little like Minecraft after all. The adventure element twinned with the no-rules player agency element, in this case virtual programming.

You can find some specs and sample code for said CPU, known as the DCPU-16 here, if you’re of a mind to.

There are no screenshots, release dates or suchlike for the game itself available yet, but a more comprehensive list of planned featres and discussion on how the emulated CPU works is over on 0x10c’s site.

Just one more thing. There will be a multiplayer aspect to this, set with one persistent, connected ‘multiverse’ which in turn means “The cost of the game is still undecided, but it’s likely there will be a monthly fee for joining the Multiverse as we are going to emulate all computers and physics even when players aren’t logged in. Single player won’t have any recurring fees.”

Is that a worried throat-clearing from somewhere in Iceland I can hear?