MineClone2, inspired by Minecraft, gets renamed to VoxeLibre

I thought the new name was a joke, guess they really went with it then. Terrible.

I knew from when I first played it that the name would inevitably be changed eventually, and here we are. I don't know what the other options in the running were, but now they've picked one hopefully it'll let them branch out more than the old name would've.

QuoteInspired by the core gameplay of Minecraft, the name MineClone2 was not a particularly good one and it seems the developers were aware and so it's gone through a rebrand to be now called VoxeLibre.

They could have chosen a better new name :P

Personally, I thought mineclone was a fitting name. It's literally a game trying to feature parody minecraft. If they're trying to branch off, they need to lose all their minecraft mobs, like pillagers, endermen, and even creepers.

Wow, that sure is a name for a game where you mine and build things

We had a community vote over the name, after a months long period of gathering suggestions. Obviously some preferred other names, but most of the votes went to VoxeLibre and we switched to it. Jokingly, I mentioned the other day in our chat that if Microjang ever renames, I'd be happy to take the name "Minecraft" off their hands because it sounds pretty good.

The Minecraft-specific mobs won't disappear, but they're going to be reskinned and renamed to avoid poking the bear. And for the gameplay to remain the same, the functionality and drops will stay the same.

The rename was important for two main reasons:
1. it wasn't great on its own (it sounded like a cheap knockoff, and it was never a parody game anyway)
2. it set the expectation to strictly follow Minecraft's footsteps

The obvious problem with the latter is that it could've put the project in a bad position if someone at Microjang decided we were following them too close. No one wants to feed that beast at the expense of years of hard work to make this free and open source game.

There are plans for additional content, but that will be tackled sensibly, likely initially with official mods to test the waters and see if our community enjoys the new stuff and prefers having it in the base game. And then there may be new content that doesn't affect the core experience in any way.

As expected, there's no shortage of great ideas floating around. But it's a community project and feedback is quite important in shaping it, especially now, so you can join us on Discord or Matrix for real-time feedback and even cast votes when it comes to that. :)

How is it spelled through ? Is it the Spanish Libre of Cuba Libre, a English libre (no idea ho it is spelled in English) or something different ?

I've been in IT for a long enough time to know that people will call stuff they way it rolls on their tongue the easiest. Resistance is futile.

Now considering the combination of Voxel and Libre, a fairly close pronunciation would sound like vox-uh-lee-breh.

Quoting: kneekooWe had a community vote over the name, after a months long period of gathering suggestions. Obviously some preferred other names, but most of the votes went to VoxeLibre and we switched to it. Jokingly, I mentioned the other day in our chat that if Microjang ever renames, I'd be happy to take the name "Minecraft" off their hands because it sounds pretty good.

The Minecraft-specific mobs won't disappear, but they're going to be reskinned and renamed to avoid poking the bear. And for the gameplay to remain the same, the functionality and drops will stay the same.

The rename was important for two main reasons:
1. it wasn't great on its own (it sounded like a cheap knockoff, and it was never a parody game anyway)
2. it set the expectation to strictly follow Minecraft's footsteps

The obvious problem with the latter is that it could've put the project in a bad position if someone at Microjang decided we were following them too close. No one wants to feed that beast at the expense of years of hard work to make this free and open source game.

There are plans for additional content, but that will be tackled sensibly, likely initially with official mods to test the waters and see if our community enjoys the new stuff and prefers having it in the base game. And then there may be new content that doesn't affect the core experience in any way.

As expected, there's no shortage of great ideas floating around. But it's a community project and feedback is quite important in shaping it, especially now, so you can join us on Discord or Matrix for real-time feedback and even cast votes when it comes to that. :)

Thanks for the information! Honestly, I'd love to see ex Mineclone move on a bit, change up the dimensions and add more stuff.

Quoting: NathanaelKStottlemyerThanks for the information! Honestly, I'd love to see ex Mineclone move on a bit, change up the dimensions and add more stuff.

Oh, I'd love that too. Quite a while back, before we even started looking for a new name, I had a bunch of ideas to enhance the base game with an extra dimension, mobs and NPCs that would've kept the base gameplay unaffected while also giving plenty of additional content.

The main point was specifically to have something that doesn't alter the balance of the game in any way, so that Minecraft "purists" could enjoy the game as they want, even in multiplayer with people who would make use of the extra features. The secondary point was to stay within the existing mechanics and APIs, so that making it happen would not require changes, but rather additions. And the third point was to allow updating the game and adding this to existing worlds without breaking anything.

This might just be a happy case of procrastination, because along with the rebranding we could consider even non-purist features. But now is the time to write it all down, so everyone can nitpick it and see what happens. :)

I actually dreaded putting the whole thing "on paper" because after I wrote a whole page making the case for this non-trivial addition, I realized that the approach was bad - too much to read and digest. And by non-trivial I mean the content generated by this would be pretty significant, like 2-3 Minecraft releases, despite not adding new mechanics. Well, the new dimension would have some specific limitations, so to speak, mainly to make it scalable to multiplayer. But I don't want to divulge any of it at this point. I hope I'll manage to write it all down so our developers and art contributors can dissect it and run with it.