Interesting Minecraft-clone Projects

I’ve been following Minecraft development for awhile, and I’ve always wondered what future Minecraft games might look like. Surprisingly, there already seems to be a couple working clones and bunch more in development. I wouldn’t be surprised if major game development are starting to work on their own Minecraft games as well, who knows!

Manic Digger

Manic Digger is a working Minecraft clone written in C# using (I’m assuming) XNA. It keeps the blocky style from the original minecraft and some new features. According to their wiki:

New blocks (Natrium, Platinum, Lead to name a few)

New monsters (Dragons, imps, giants!)

Monster editor

It’s also open source, if you’re the kind of guy who likes hacking on open source C# projects. It only works in Windows at the moment.

Meincraft

meinKraft is a small Minecraft-like tech demo written in C. He says the source is included but I didn’t see it in the zip.

RogueMiner

A C++ Minecraft project! This one looks interesting. RogueMiner looks to be a Minecraft clone built from scratch using SDL and OpenGL.

Ogre3D projects

There have been some interesting discussions on the Ogre3D forums about new efficient Minecraft implementations. A person named Kojack put together a pretty cool tech demo using various shader implementations:

I highly recommend you read his posts on the Ogre3D forums if you’re interested in this stuff.

Cubelands

Can’t say much about this one, it looks to be the most polished Minecraft clone to date. It’s currently in private beta.

Future

Most of the clones I found seem to be trying to emulate Minecraft as close as possible. While this is great and all, what I’d really like to see in future Minecraft titles are:

More realistic, immersive gameplay

MMO?

Infinite depth, harder difficulty the further down you go.

Physics?

There’s so many things that you could do in a game like this, I look forward to future projects. I may even take a stab at it.