The Future State of Minecraft

No one can deny the success of Minecraft. With more and more copies bought every day and millions of fans Minecraft is a wonderful success however I find myself wondering what the future holds for this beloved game.

The current state of Minecraft development seems to be focused on adding undelivered features and fixing many of the more annoying bugs that made it into the official release.

One such feature that remains unfulfilled is official mod support. Mod support and a healthy moding community can dramatically increase the longevity of any game and in some cases help drive it's sales. Minecraft already has a very creative and strong moding community however Mojang should not rely on mods alone to steer the direction future Minecraft development.

I believe the strongest possible future for Minecraft lies in the core reason for it's success, Crafting.

Crafting or more appropriately building is one of Minecraft's strongest features and also one of it's more neglected. How could I call the building aspect of Minecraft a neglected feature? Mostly because It's the feature that has the most potential to let the players, who's in game created content helps drive the community crate ever more amazing and sophisticated creations. However it's one of the less expanded aspects of the game given the amount of development time given to it.

A good case for this argument is the piston mod. If your not familiar with how pistons work they give the player the ability to mechanically move up to sixteen world blocks in a set direction.

After this mod was incorporated into the game by the developers the community began to build some very ingenuous things like self building self repairing structures and in game 3d printers.

Pistons were successful because they allowed you to change what you built and how you built it and added a form of movement to a otherwise static world or structure.

Now imagine that they gave you more ways to build and change what you built. Imagine magnetized blocks that attract or repel others or bouncy blocks made of rubber? How would you build your creations if given the ability to glue certain blocks together and have them move as a single unit?

My hope for the future of Minecraft lies in ideas like these. Simple mechanics that can be combined with others to create beautiful and complex creations limited only by the users imagination.

When you really think about it Minecraft is very much like a set of Legos. Lego is always creating new Lego bricks that can be used in different ways by the people who build and play with them. Mojang would be wise to use a similar approach with Minecraft.