Minecraft dreams...

Minecraft is a wonderful little game, appealing to my sense of exploration and creation. I have spent hours just digging out tunnels and wandering the landscape however as each patch passes with it the game seems to step away with what I hope it would become. This is no slight on the developers but simply my own wishes for the game. So without further ado I'd like to mention the 'stuff' I'd love to see in Minecraft. A lot of this is based on Dwarf Fortress which was a part of the inspiration for the game and while I don't want to see a 3d block based DF, in my own personal wish list I'd love to see more aspects of it come together. Really though, a lot of this would have to be a completely separate game mode, a 'Fortress' mode I guess :)

1) Reward the explorer

So far in Minecraft there's very little reason to go exploring other than "because you can" and while I love exploring "because I can" I can't help but feel a little bit more enticement to go outside your spawn point would be nice. Pumpkins are a nice touch but lets add more things that spawn above ground to find, whether it's rare plants, exposed minerals, wood etc, I'm sure there's more that could be found. It doesn't even have to be useful.. Just something to find and collect.

2) Reset your spawn point

So if you do find somewhere awesome and would love to setup base there you pretty much can't due to the spawn point being static. Let us craft something requiring a lot of materials or rare stuff to actually let us rebind a spawn to a new location (must be above ground and must have no blocks above it)

3) Able to MAKE a living world

Dwarf Fortress was a small inspiration to the game but part of DF was that it became a living and breathing world, you'd need to grow crops, dig ore, defend the fortress and make it so it would become a central place to live for other Dwarves... I'd love to be able to trade ore I found to passing merchants and build up something which would come alive after you establish it as a potential colony... Maybe there's even other fortresses out there to work with.

4) The goblin horde

Or any underground horde really.. Ratmen, Orcs, spider people... Imagine creating your fortress and then you end up digging into a cavern to unleash a swarm of dangerous mobs. Maybe an army will show up and try to assault the front of your mine/fortress structure etc, destroying blocks until they're defeated, even better if it works with NPC allies :)

5) Stone Carving

You're still limited to blocks really, I'd love to be able to make proper carvings in the stone to decorate my mines and forts. Whether Dwarven runes or Orcish glyphs, I'd like to be able to tell a story in the walls.

6) More mobs

Lets be honest, it's pretty limited.. I think it'd be great having more mobs in the game (such as the above mentioned) and things such as giants, Merfolk, polar bears etc. I know there's mods to allow more mobs but to actually have a proper collection in game would be great. You could even turn off set mobs in the world generator if you don't want to put up with certain types.

7) Trading posts

So if you have an excess amount of ore or gems, why not be able to trade it for other materials? Even 100 wool could be traded for one block of gold ore for example. This potentially would work more in conjunction with the living world aspect, once you establish a colony you can get trade posts setup.

8) More ore types

I actually remember this from my good old Ultima Online days.. Mining and finding shadow, agapite, verite and valorite ore.. All different rarities with different properties. Would love to be more ore, whether fantastical or not which has more benefit than just colour and durability

9) History to the world

You're meant to be on an unexplored world (I think). Who is to say it's completely unspoiled? Maybe we could find ruins, ancient mines (leading to dragons!), abandoned structures or graves. I know we have dungeons but lets increase the variety of 'man made' objects in the world that can be found. 

10) More world themes

The biomes are great but I'd love to generate a pure desert, volcanic, ashland, swamp or other terrain types just to spice things up a bit.

As you can tell it's all pretty 'RP' type stuff but that's just how my mind works really. I'm sure a lot of this is available as mods but you'd need to combine them to get a Fortress mode. I'm hopeless at the redstone stuff, I just don't understand it, so it's wasted on me sadly and while it's incredibly cool I just can't get my head around it. So that's my wishlist.. Maybe one day we'll see Fortcraft.. or Minefort.. In the meantime I'm keeping my eyes on a little game called Survivors of Ragnarok (more about this another day).