0x10c

0x10c was a space sandbox game that was being developed by Markus "Notch" Persson and Mojang AB during 2012 and 2013 as a followup to Minecraft. It has since been cancelled, and at present it seems unlikely that Notch, or anyone currently working at Mojang, will resume its development.

"0x" is a prefix used in several programming languages, to indicate a hexadecimal number. "0x10c" (ten to the C power) is a hexadecimal number equivalent to 1612 in decimal, which equals 281,474,976,710,656, which was the number of years that had passed since 1988 in the game's story.

Announcement
In March 2011, Notch was asked in an interview if Mojang had any plans for another game, and Notch expressed his desire to create an "extremely nerdy" space trading simulator. Later, in December 2011, Notch announced he would be stepping down as lead developer of Minecraft, and that he would begin working on another project. Mojang CEO Carl Manneh said in an interview with Edge Online in January 2012 that Mojang was committed to supporting a new project that Notch was developing. In March 2012, he revealed that there were three different projects he was working on, but he had yet to decide which one he was committed to. On March 13th, he announced he would begin prototyping a space game, and on March 21st, in an interview with PC Gamer magazine, he announced that he was working on a space-themed game that was inspired by the television show Firefly and the video game Elite.

On April Fools' Day 2012, instead of a typical Minecraft April Fools joke, as was the case the prior year and every year since, Mojang launched a satirical website for a space game entitled Mars Effect, citing a lawsuit with Bethesda regarding the title of the Mojang game Scrolls as an inspiration. However, the gameplay elements remained true, and on April 3, 2012, Mojang revealed it as an actual space sandbox title, ''0x10c.

The game's backstory, as told by Notch on the website, was this:

The game was to feature:
 * Hard science fiction
 * Lots of engineering
 * Fully working computer system
 * Space battles against the AI or other players
 * Abandoned ships full of loot
 * Duct tape
 * Seamlessly landing on planets
 * Advanced economy system
 * Random encounters
 * Mining, trading, and looting
 * Single and multi player connected via the multiverse

Of particular interest was the in-game computer, the DCPU-16. This was a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that could be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish. Full specifications of the CPU were released soon after the game's announcement, so the more programatically advanced of the playerbase could get a head start. These specifications, along with the specifications for several pieces of in-game hardware that would have been able to interface with the DCPU-16, can be found here.

0x10c was planned to require its players to pay a monthly subscription fee in order to access the global multiplayer server that was planned to exist, due to the computational cost of simulating the trajectories and onboard systems of all the player's ships, even when the players piloting those ships weren't logged in. A recurring fee would not have been required to play singleplayer, and it's likely there would have been the option to play on smaller, privately hosted servers for free, as in Minecraft. The initial cost of buying the game was planned to start out small and increase as the game was developed, similarly to how Minecraft's price increased during the first few years of its development.

Development
Soon after the announcement of 0x10c, Notch began posting on Twitter about his plans for the game, and began putting images of the prototype versions on his website. A forums, Reddit community, wiki, and numerous other fan-made websites were created, and Notch began communicating with fans about the game on the Reddit community as well.

On April 16, 2012, Notch posted an image on the 0x10c website containing a puzzle. When decoded, it revealed the word "Montauk", which was the password to get into another page on the website, which contained 99 codes which could each be redeemed once on the Mojang website to add 0x10c to the user’s Mojang account, which would have allowed them to play it as soon as the game was eventually released. 0x10c remained part of these user’s Mojang accounts until it was eventually removed from the Mojang account system in 2020.

On May 2, 2012, Notch launched an ARG to promote the game. A secret page on the 0x10c website read "insufficient power" along with a power percentage. The more people visited this page, the higher the power percentage became until eventually reaching 100%, whereupon a large amount of garbled code was revealed, which the community determined represented radio signals from a pulsar. Discrepancies in the repeating pulsar signals were eventually decoded and revealed to be garbled text taken from Isaac Asimov’s short story , which, like 0x10c, also takes place in the extremely distant future of the universe.

Notch also began livestreaming himself coding 0x10c on Twitch. One of the results of this was viewers were able to copy significant amounts of the code and create a reverse-engineered version of the game. Notch asked that this not be publicly released, as the game was not yet close to a state he felt comfortable releasing. However, a prototype version of the game was accidentally leaked anyway, when Notch uploaded it to a private page on his website but forgot to disallow users from viewing all the site's files. This prototype, featuring a dark room with a computer, can be found here.

Originally, Notch intended for the art style of 0x10c to be mostly textureless, citing the 1993 game Frontier as inspiration. However, he later changed his mind, and in September 2012, Jonatan Pöljö, also known as Eldrone, was hired as an artist for the game, and created most of the textures and models seen in the later footage. According to Eldrone:

Progress continued, and eventually, in October 2012, Notch released several videos on YouTube and the 0x10c website showcasing the progress he had made,  including two physics test videos, an art test video and a multiplayer test video. Eventually, a semi-playable version, featuring a fully modeled and textured spacecraft with an interior and exterior, functional multiplayer and PVP, and the basics of the in-game computer systems, was created, and Notch livestreamed himself battling other Mojang employees onboard the ship.

Later, on January 21, 2013, Eldrone released a "Facebuilder" demo as a preview of the game's player customization system, created in Unity. This can be found here.

Cancellation
0x10c was eventually put on hold in April of 2013 because Notch had found creative blocks. However, at the time, he was still interested in expanding the development staff to push the game toward release.

Eventually, on August 13, 2013, Notch announced in a Team Fortress 2 livestream that 0x10c was indefinitely shelved, but Notch added that it could be made in the future if another Mojang employee was interested in developing it.

On August 19th, Notch wrote on his blog "The Word of Notch" about his reasons for the game's cancellation:

He then expressed his desire to not become "another under delivering visionary game developer", and said he would instead focus on making "smaller games that can fail" in the future. Regarding 0x10c, he said that "I want to play this game so much, but I am not the right person to make it. Not any more. I’m convinced a new team with less public interest can make a vastly superior game than what I would make."

On September 15, 2014, following Mojang's acquisition by Microsoft, and Notch's departure from the company, the soundtrack for 0x10c was released by Daniel Rosenfeld. He stated:

Eldrone would later release images of additional art assets created for 0x10c on his Twitter and website.

Gameplay
The game was planned to have "Minecraft in space" style gameplay. Players would have been able to build their own ships using a ship editor. Players would first build the external part, and then go into a room mode with a cutaway view of the ship, in which players would be able to carve out rooms with custom dimensions. Using the ship editor, players would be able to make convex rooms with 45 degree walls, to keep it simple to use, and to encourage the use of multiple rooms. Rooms could have variable height and be placed on different heights. The ship editor would create a more or less empty frame of a ship, and players would then have to place panels and other things manually in the actual game. It would be impossible to design a ship that isn't airtight, as a bounding volume would be made first, then rooms would be dug out after. Things like stripes and names could be placed on the outsides of ships.

Players would keep their ships after respawning. Spacecraft would be "smaller than the nostromo, larger than a tie fighter." Smaller ships could be docked inside of and launched from larger ships. Hyperspace travel would also have been present. Ships would have sometimes gone dark for various reasons such as power failures, technical problems, and trying to avoid visual detection through windows. Ships would receive and lose heat from thermal radiation. Passive stealth through minimizing a ship's emitted energy would be possible.

While inside a ship, players would always be oriented upright, even in zero-gravity. Outside ships, players would be able to rotate freely in any direction. Everything’s position would be measured relative to the center of the player’s current ship, with the rest of the universe moving around it from the ship’s point of view. Explosions in space would have been realistic. When a ship explodes, it begins to leak air and spin around before popping apart. There would have been no sound transmission through vacuums, but sounds from ships getting hit by things such as debris from explosions would be audible from inside those ships. Crashing into asteroids or planets would damage onboard systems and require players to scavenge for parts to repair their ship. Ships could have specialized rooms, such as medical bays, and mess halls for food. Oxygen would "magically last forever", unless there was a hull breach.

There would have been a large selection of different devices and other objects players would have been able to place on their ship. These include:
 * The DCPU-16: a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that could be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish. The DCPU-16 would still function while on fire, but slower and with the RAM changing randomly. The ingame computers would crash if their interrupt queue was overflowed, if a specific undocumented code was called, or if the box was physically harmed. When it crashed, it would go into a state where sequential areas of ram would get overwritten with random noise, and the opcodes would take a lot longer to process. Since the monitor was memory mapped, it would blindly display this garbage data. The computers, and the game itself, would both run at 60 ticks per second. A single ship would be able to support about three computers. An open-source community-made operating system would be on the default computers. Updated versions of the DCPU would be available as new computers. More efficient computers could be found in abandoned ships, such as one that does 112 khz at 94% power usage. Flying in highly radiated areas would cause random bits in a computer's ram to flip. Computers could have text-to-speech software.
 * The LEM1802 (Low Energy Monitor): a 128x96 pixel 16-color CRT monitor. Clicking a keyboard or a monitor would lock input, turn your view towards the connected monitor, and slightly zoom in. Escape would exit. Screen burn would have been present on CRT monitors. Multiple monitors would be able to connect to a single CPU, which can all display the same image, or can be memory mapped to different regions to produce different images on each one. Custom 16-color palettes would be available for computers.
 * Power generators. Each ship would have a generator capable of producing a fixed wattage, and everything players would connect to it would drain wattage. Each player would only be able to have one generator at a time, but multiple players would be able to place their generators on a single ship to give it more power, encouraging cooperation between players. Generators would not have required fuel. Generators would explode when destroyed. Reactor cores would emit light.
 * Gravity generators. When a ship’s gravity generator is unpowered, objects inside the ship would be subject to the same physical forces as the ship itself. Artificial gravity generators would would recharge when hovering over a planet. Rotation-produced artificial gravity would also have been possible, as well as using magnetic boots to walk on surfaces in zero-gravity.
 * The SPC2000 (Suspension Chamber): a deep sleep cell containing a ZEF882 Time Dilation Field Generator. If a player's generator was intact, they would be able to respawn in a sleep chamber powered by the generator. If a player's generator wasn't intact, a friend would need to revive them, or they would have to wait for everyone to die to respawn the ship.
 * A hyperverse EM array which connects to web servers, a multiverse EM array which connects to other multiplayer games, and a universe EM array which is limited to one game. Hyperverse communication would have been very slow.
 * Doors, which could be opened into space to put out fires. If doors stopped working, players would need to manually open them by either using blowtorch or hacking into them.
 * Cloaking fields. These would have required almost all the power from the generator, forcing players to turn off all computers and dim all lights in order to successfully cloak.
 * 1.44 megabyte 3½ inch floppy discs and floppy drives. You would be able to use other people’s programs on your ship’s computer by using floppy discs.
 * Wires and other attachments that hang from the ceiling. Wires would run electricity from the generator to other devices.
 * Landing gear, which may break if a ship lands too hard. Landing gear would need to be powered for it to work.
 * The SPED-3 (Suspended Particle Exciter Display): a device that creates line-based holographic images.
 * Buttons and knobs, which could have midi inputs mapped to them.
 * Batteries, which would store power produced by generators.
 * Cooling systems, necessary for putting out fires.
 * Oxygen containers and graviton emitters.
 * 400 square kilometer maps.
 * 10 megabyte hard drives.
 * Automated turrets.
 * Switch panels.
 * Refrigerators.
 * 3D printers.
 * Keyboards.
 * Sensors.
 * Robots.
 * Radars.
 * Clocks.

Devices would have been able to be overclocked, which may cause them to catch fire. Underclocking devices would let them use less power at the cost of being less efficient. Devices would have their own inventory, into which interior components could be placed. The devices themselves would be craftable from various materials using 3D printers, but the interior components would have to be scavenged from abandoned ships. Each of these components would come in many variants with different attributes. Things such as guns, refrigerators, computers, and shield generators would have an inventory with specific slots. Rifles and fridges, for example, would both be able to use cooling units, so players would have to choose whether to put their "titanium extravagant alien cooling unit" in their fridge to save generator power, or in their gauss sniper rifle to save cooldown time.

Players would have been able to map controller inputs to ingame hardware. There would have been electrical and mechanical engineering, rotating rooms, and machines built using the physics engine. It would have been possible to build computer-controlled ground vehicles with wheels, batteries, mineral sensors and digging modules. Hardware would be memory mapped to connected computers. For example, an engine would have its power and rotation mapped to a memory region. Players would control the engines, not the ship, which would then push the ship around. Computers would translate the position of the enemy's ship from sensors into angles for the ship's cannons to use in aiming. Cheap turrets and sensors would have built-in inaccuracy.

There would have been player XP and skills. There would have been a leveling system in which players would level up in specialized skills. Dying would reset the player’s levels. There would have been sounds from the player’s body. Duct tape would be able to fix anything for a limited amount of time. There would be walkmans for playing music, which would slow down when their battery is low. LP copies of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up would exist as in-game items. Flashlights could be used for spelunking and fixing broken ships. Modular guns with cross compatible modules could be found as loot, with a total of "100 bazillion" guns. These would include plasma pistols and laser guns. Laser guns would cause the target to heat up before taking damage. Weapons would consume power or ammunition when fired.

There would have been a player-driven economy system, and building ships and space stations would cost resources. Singleplayer would have optional cheats. Transferring information would have been possible through floppy disks and radio arrays. There would have been a credits system and an ingame program store. Large bases and structures built by players such as space stations would be shared between games and could be encountered in singleplayer. There would also be randomly generated abandoned ships floating in space, with aliens and robots inside, and loot such as screens and CPUs.

There were to be "very pretty" stars and planets. Asteroids and planets were "icosahedrons (20 sided dice) fed to a make-surface-from-arbitrary-triangle-mesh code that subdivides, colorizes and offsets the polygons based off various parameters tweaked per body type". There may also have been "orbitals and halo worlds" with planetary terrain on their interiors. Planets would be big enough that 32 players on a planet would "pretty much never see each other". There would have been planet gameplay, liquid water on planets, and planetary ecologies, though most life would be dead. There would also be many different planet types. Planets would be realistically sized, and there would be realistic orbital mechanics, and rogue planets. The game would not show any planet or star names. Players would have been able to mine for gold and other metals. Terrain was not planned to be modifiable, in order to reduce world file sizes.

Space was to be very dark, with most surviving stars being fairly dim and small. The number of stars would be "large enough to feel large, but small enough so that players could map them all if they wanted to." There would have been an "explorable number" of stars, about 100,000. Star positions would be static, but planets would orbit and spin. Stars would be closer together due to the big crunch. There would have been neutron stars, and black holes with gravitational lensing around them. Most solar systems would be a brown dwarf with very few surviving planets, though there would be an extremely small number of young stars.

Lighting was planned to be more complex than in Minecraft, which was because Minecraft focused on many blocks and polygons that could all change at any time, whereas 0x10c focused on modern lighting with very few polygons that rarely changed. For example, computer monitors would illuminate their surroundings with the same colors being displayed on the screen. The game would have a "this is what we thought the future would be like in the 80's"-look, and a wireframe graphics mode. Music would take a long time to build up, and there would be a lot of ambient sound effects. The sound engine supported samples, procedural sounds and effects.

A monthly subscription fee would have been required to access a global multiplayer server called the multiverse, due to the computational cost of simulating the trajectories and computers of all the player's ships, even when the players piloting those ships weren't logged in. Private multiplayer servers would be free to use, have IP-based and LAN options, and could be run on older versions. The game would run on a local server even in singleplayer. VR support was planned. There were to be a large number of fictional hardware and software developers,    and possibly a faction that outlaws open source software. A full time writer for the game was planned.

Trivia

 * According to Notch, the game’s name was "intentionally bad" as a marketing experiment to see if Mojang could get away with naming their next game "pretty much anything".
 * According to Notch, the original name for 0x10c was "Dusk", referring to the dark, dying galaxy.
 * "Mackapar Media", a fictional company that produced some of the in-game hardware, was the company credited on Mojang's Pig Tales website, and is also mentioned in a video advertising the original LEGO Minecraft set.
 * Another word for the number represented by the hexadecimal value "0x10c" is "Trillek".
 * The sound of the weapon seen in some of the videos is taken from the blaster from the game Quake 2.
 * Some of the videos from the game’s development contain a low-poly model of the Soldier character from the game Team Fortress 2.
 * The game was not planned to use alpha or beta labels, with the first phase of development being referred to as "Montauk".
 * According to Notch, 0x10c was inspired by Firefly, Elite, Alien, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, FTL, Noctis, and Proteus.
 * The game was originally planned to use an emulated 6502 processor before Notch decided to create a fictional custom computer.

Music
0x10c is the soundtrack released for 0x10c by C418, which features several songs created for the game before its cancellation. It was released on September 15, 2014 on Bandcamp.