Chapter 206: Basic Settings and Partial Modifications (Fifth Update, Requesting Subscriptions, Monthly Pass)

After Chen Xu finished explaining the initial concept draft of Minecraft, everyone began swiftly preparing for their respective tasks.

One group focused on the subsequent operations of Don't Starve, as well as releasing new DLC content.

As for Minecraft, the reserved development cycle was set at over half a year.

For Chen Xu, the current priority was to help Qin Yi and the team understand the core gameplay concepts of Minecraft, and begin producing the game's art assets.

Meanwhile, Chen Xu still needed to refine the foundational rules documentation for Minecraft in greater detail.

Moreover, unlike the version from his previous life, Chen Xu's development of Minecraft required comprehensive optimizations across multiple aspects.

First was the game modes.

According to Chen Xu's plan, the initial version of Minecraft at launch would feature three distinct modes.

The first was purely solo mode—no explanation needed, encompassing both Creative and Survival.

Players would create a world, and the terrain would generate procedurally. As players explored, the world would expand infinitely, with no defined boundaries. Theoretically, the size of the map was limited only by the player's hard drive capacity.

Next came multiplayer online multiplayer, which included local servers hosted on player machines or dedicated servers set up by players themselves.

Within these servers, players could formulate corresponding rules, and server administrators (admins) could add various MOD modules.

In short, rule-setting would be placed directly in the hands of the players.

Finally, there would be official servers—essentially pure, vanilla servers.

These would be divided into Creative and Survival modes, each running on a fixed world map, segmented into different regional servers, each supporting up to 2,000 players across a massive shared map.

Later, as more MODs became available, specialized official servers for mini-games would be introduced.

Examples include Bed Wars, Hide and Seek, Master Builder, and more.

There were also issues related to individual player experiences—such as the most frustrating problem players faced in the previous life’s Minecraft.

After opening a server, the elaborate structures and massive projects painstakingly built by players would often be destroyed by incoming troublemaking players/griefers.

Watching Trinitrotoluene (TNT) explode and obliterate their creations, many players’ hearts would shatter.

As a result, in the previous life, many server admins would install anti-explosion plugins, disable falling fluids, prevent lava flow, and allow territory claiming to protect their hard work.

Chen Xu intended to implement a dedicated system allowing players on their own servers to set specific structures as indestructible or restrict others' permissions, thus preventing griefers.

However, these player experience-related features would be tested incrementally by the testing team after the initial version of the game was completed, with adjustments made based on real-world feedback.

The remaining task involved defining the basic materials of the world, following the model of the previous life’s Minecraft.

Dirt, Sand, Shelter Stone, water, lava, trees, various minerals, and creatures such as pigs, cows, and Hex.

Using different materials and tools like the crafting table, players could synthesize new items.

Inside Nebula Games' office, Chen Xu meticulously refined the basic concept draft of Minecraft.

In addition to the original content from his previous life, Chen Xu also considered integrating settings from some excellent MODs into Minecraft’s core system.

After all, Minecraft’s core philosophy was openness.

What players created depended entirely on themselves. By providing clearer and more comprehensive crafting rule charts, players could directly produce more in-game content without having to constantly search for crafting recipes on a Search Engine, as was often necessary in the previous life when lacking a crafting recipe book MOD.

It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that without a crafting guide, most players wouldn’t be able to survive independently in Minecraft.

The number of craftable items and systems was simply too vast—even many veteran players couldn’t claim to fully remember every detail.

Additionally, Chen Xu had another idea: introducing heavily modded content into the base game.

For instance, enriching the tech tree to establish a more complete Technology development path.

In the previous life, many such MODs already existed for Minecraft.

Initially, players used various materials to build cars and firearms, but these were merely static props with no functionality.

To address this limitation, numerous veteran MOD authors created MODs enabling cars to drive and firearms to fire, allowing players to enjoy FPS and Racing games within Minecraft. With enough creativity, players could even pilot mechs.

Chen Xu planned to integrate such features directly into the base game as official content.

Why shouldn’t a car move if the player fulfilled the construction requirements?

If players built an airplane or a rocket, why shouldn’t they be able to fly?

From a technical standpoint, Chen Xu had carefully considered this—it wasn’t particularly difficult.

As for whether players could understand advanced mechanics like Redstone technology, it wasn’t as if all players in the previous life had mastered it anyway.

It was well known that Minecraft players evolved through distinct Civilization stages:

The first stage: primitive cave dwellers living in barbarism.

The second stage: entering primitive society, understanding the importance of domesticating animals.

The third stage: the dawn of the industrial era, finally grasping the basic concepts of Redstone technology.

Beyond that lay the realm of veteran players—masters of advanced Redstone technology, capable of building in-game computers that could not only perform calculations but also input Chinese characters, run Snake (Game), and even Minesweeper (Game).

Meanwhile, for most ordinary players, the situation was this: while they were still struggling with command blocks, the veteran players had already achieved full industrialization.

Besides these changes, another challenging task for Chen Xu was the specialized optimization for Minecraft’s MOD support.

For games like Overcooked and Fall Guys, map level design was made accessible by using modular, pre-existing materials that players could assemble.

But Minecraft clearly couldn’t follow that approach.

In the previous life, Minecraft had multiple versions.

The original Java Edition, developed in Java language, was highly open but poorly optimized.

Precisely because of Java, early Minecraft had an abundance of MODs, greatly enriching its game ecosystem.

It remained the favorite version among many players and MOD authors.

Later came the Bedrock Edition, which offered better optimization but significantly reduced openness. MOD makers found it far more restrictive, and the MOD content was nowhere near as rich as in the Java Edition.

For Chen Xu, however, Minecraft would run directly on the Official Game Engine, eliminating version fragmentation entirely.

This brought a significant challenge.

Chen Xu needed to create dedicated open ports and specialized tools specifically for Minecraft, enabling players to create MODs more easily and conveniently.

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