Mojang's New Game Is Called 0x10c

Today Markus "Notch" Persson unveiled his next project. 0x10c, a "very ambitious" space-themed game, is said to be extremely early in development. However, Notch did share a few of the game's features and explain what the heck the title means.

"In a parallel universe where the space race never ended, space travel was gaining popularity amongst corporations and rich individuals," says the official website of the game. "In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years."

"It's now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy."

Again, the development of the game is still in its early stages but Mojang has a rough idea of what the game will be like. They want it to be a hard sci-fi game with engineering and a fully working computer system. Players will engage in space battles with both the A.I. and other players. They'll also explore the various planets of the galaxy and engage in trading, mining, and a bit of random looting.

One central feature of the game is power management. Every ship's generator has a fixed wattage that is drained by anything hooked up to it. For example, a cloaking device could drain all of your power and require you to turn off all the ship's computers to run it successfully.

"The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can 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 will be released shortly, so the more programatically advanced of you can get a head start."

The game's site says that the cost hasn't been nailed down yet. The persistent world - or "Multiverse" - will probably require a monthly fee to join, though.