π Image A spacecraft interior featuring robots and computers.π Image A spacecraft customization system, with a ringed planet and moon in the background.
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.
"0x" is a prefix used in several programming languages to indicate a hexadecimal number. "0x10c" (ten to the power of C) 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.
On January 30, 2024, Notch tweeted,[1] wondering if the name 0x10c went under Microsoft's name when they acquired Mojang.
π Image A spacecraft interior with an asteroid and star outside.π Image A planet and star.
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.[2][3] 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.[4] 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.[5] 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.[6] On March 13th, he announced he would begin prototyping a space game,[7] 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.[8]
On April Fools' Day 2012, instead of a typical MinecraftApril 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,[9] citing a lawsuit with Bethesda regarding the title of the Mojang game Scrolls as an inspiration.[10] However, the gameplay elements remained true, and on April 3, 2012, Mojang revealed it as an actual space sandbox title, 0x10c.[11]
The game's backstory, as told by Notch on the website, was this:
β
In a parallel universe where the space race never ended, space travel was gaining popularity amongst corporations and rich individuals.
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.[12]
β
β Notch
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 the 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.[13] These specifications, along with the specifications for several pieces of in-game hardware that would be 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 players' ships, even when the players piloting those ships weren't logged in.[14] A recurring fee would not be required to play singleplayer, and it's likely there would be the option to play on smaller, privately hosted servers for free, as in Minecraft.[15] 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.
π Image A computer screen.π Image A "3D vector projector" for creating holographic images.
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.[16] A forum, 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.[17] 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 userβs Mojang account, which would have allowed them to play it as soon as the game was eventually released.[18]0x10c remained part of these users' 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.[19] Discrepancies in the repeating pulsar signals were eventually decoded and revealed to be garbled text taken from Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question, which, like 0x10c, also takes place in the extremely distant future of the universe.[20][21]
Notch also began livestreaming himself coding 0x10c on Twitch.[22][23] One of the results of this was that viewers were able to copy significant amounts of the code and create a reverse-engineered version of the game.[24] Notch asked that this not be publicly released, as the game was not yet close to a state he felt comfortable releasing.[25][26] 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.[27] 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.[28] However, he later changed his mind, and in September 2012, Jonatan PΓΆljΓΆ, 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.[29] According to Eldrone:
β
The style is pixel art meets modern 3D. Itβs influenced by bright, vivid sci-fi, and real-world functional spaceship design to go with 0x10cβs realistic tone.
The idea is to give people flexible in-game tools for creativity, and have the outcome look fantastic no matter how they piece things together.[30]
β
β Eldrone
Progress continued, and eventually, in October 2012, Notch released several videos on YouTube and the 0x10c website showcasing the progress he had made,[31][32][33] 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.[34]
On October 20, 2012, it was announced on the game's website that three 0x10c-themed shirts were available to purchase from JINX.[35] One of these shirts had a string of numbers on it that was revealed to be a phone number.[36] When called, it played back a distorted sound clip, which, when enhanced, was revealed to be a message relating to the software error from the gameβs backstory.[37][38]
Later, on January 21, 2013, Eldrone released a "Facebuilder" demo as a preview of 0x10c's player customization system, created in Unity.[39] This can be found here.
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.[40]
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.[41]
On August 19th, Notch wrote on his blog "The Word of Notch" about his reasons for the game's cancellation:
β
What I hadnβt considered was that a lot more people cared about my games now. People got incredibly excited, and the pressure of suddenly having people care if the game got made or not started zapping the fun out of the project. I spent a lot of time thinking about if I even wanted to make games any more. I guess I could just stop talking about what I do, but that doesnβt really come all that natural to me. Over time I kinda just stopped working on it, and then eventually decided to mentally file it as "on ice" and try doing some smaller things. Turns out, what I love doing is making games. Not hyping games or trying to sell a lot of copies. I just want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak.[42]
β
β Notch
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. Iβm 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.[43] He stated:
β
I worked on it for a bit, but I think Markus thought the game would never be good enough and decided to cancel it. I personally still think the concept and world is brilliant, so Iβm bummed out that it doesnβt exist.[44]
β
β C418
Eldrone would later release images of additional art assets created for 0x10c on his Twitter and website.[45][46]
π Image A spacecraft interior featuring many types of panels.π Image A spacecraft interior featuring panels, wires and pipes.
0x10c was planned to have "Minecraft in space" style gameplay.[47] Players would be 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.[14] 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.[48] 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.[49] 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.[50] Things like stripes and names could be placed on the outsides of ships.[51]
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.[52][53] Everythingβs position would be measured relative to the center of the playerβs current ship, with the rest of the universe moving around it from the shipβs point of view.[54] Explosions in space would be realistic.[55] When a ship explodes, it begins to leak air and spin around before popping apart.[56] There would be no sound transmission through vacuums,[57][58] but sounds from ships getting hit by things such as debris from explosions would be audible from inside those ships.[59][60] Players would keep their ships after respawning.[61]
Spacecraft would be "smaller than the nostromo, larger than a tie fighter."[62] Smaller ships could be docked inside of and launched from larger ships.[63] Hyperspace travel would also be present.[64] Ships would have sometimes gone dark for various reasons such as power failures, technical problems, and trying to avoid visual detection through windows.[65] Ships would receive and lose heat from thermal radiation. Passive stealth through minimizing a ship's emitted energy would be possible.[50] Crashing into asteroids or planets would damage onboard systems and require players to scavenge for parts to repair their ship.[66][67] Ships could have specialized rooms, such as medical bays,[14] and mess halls for food. Oxygen would "magically last forever", unless there was a hull breach.[68]
There would be a large selection of different devices and other objects players would be able to place on their ship. Devices would be able to be overclocked, which may cause them to catch fire.[67] Underclocking devices would let them use less power at the cost of being less efficient.[50] Players would be able to map controller inputs to ingame hardware.[69] There would be electrical and mechanical engineering,[70] rotating rooms,[71] and machines built using the physics engine.[72] It would be 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 enemy ships from sensors into angles for the ship's cannons to use in aiming. Cheap turrets and sensors would have built-in inaccuracy.[50]
There would be a large selection of different tools and other items players would be able to use. There would be player XP and skills.[73] There would be a leveling system in which players would level up in specialized skills. Dying would reset the playerβs levels.[61] There would be sounds from the playerβs body.[74][75] There would be a player-driven economy system, and building ships and space stations would cost resources. Singleplayer would have optional cheats.[76] Transferring information would be possible through floppy disks and radio arrays.[77] There would be 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.[50]
There were to be "very pretty" stars and planets.[78] 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 be "orbitals and halo worlds" with planetary terrain on their interiors.[79] Planets would be big enough that 32 players on a planet would "pretty much never see each other".[80] There would be planet gameplay,[81] liquid water on planets,[82] and planetary ecologies, though most life would be dead.[83] 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.[50] Players would be able to mine for gold and other metals. Terrain was not planned to be modifiable, in order to reduce world file sizes.[61]
Space was to be very dark, with most surviving stars being fairly dim and small.[65] 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."[84] There would be an "explorable number" of stars, about 100,000.[50] Star positions would be static, but planets would orbit and spin.[85] Stars would be closer together due to the big crunch.[86] Some areas of the universe would have a lot of radiation.[50] There would be neutron stars,[87] and black holes with gravitational lensing around them.[88] Most solar systems would be a brown dwarf with very few surviving planets, though there would be an extremely small number of young stars.[50]
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.[89][90] For example, computer monitors would illuminate their surroundings with the same colors being displayed on the screen.[91] The game would have a "this is what we thought the future would be like in the 80's"-look,[92] and a wireframe graphics mode.[93] Music would take a long time to build up, and there would be a lot of ambient sound effects.[94] The sound engine supported samples, procedural sounds and effects.[95]
A monthly subscription fee would be required to access a global multiplayer server called the multiverse, due to the computational cost of simulating the trajectories and computers of all the players' ships, even when the players owning those ships were offline.[14] Private multiplayer servers would be free to use, have IP-based and LAN options, and could be run on older versions.[15] The game would run on a local server even in singleplayer.[96] VR support was planned.[97] There were to be a large number of fictional hardware and software developers,[98][99][100][101][102] and possibly a faction that outlaws open source software.[103] A full time writer for the game was planned.[104]
The SPC2000 (Suspension Chamber): a deep sleep cell containing a ZEF882 Time Dilation Field Generator.[105] 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.[106] The deep sleep cell is a highly illegal device that can accelerate a sphere of matter through the fourth dimension very close to the speed of light. Movement in the fourth spatial dimension will move the traveler between adjacent universes. It speeds up to very high speeds, then counts a number of ticks to calculate how far it's traveled, then slows back down. If the device isn't activated in a vacuum, the result is a large vacuum bubble in each dimension it passes through that implodes very rapidly, causing immense destruction, thus all of the devices come with built-in vacuum detectors and will not work when the ship is docked or in an atmosphere. The chamber is configurable to accelerate to speeds that cause milliseconds, minutes, hours, days or years to pass every few nanoseconds. The players in the game were the first to use this device in active use, and they all wanted to travel for 1 year to reach a star about a lightyear away, but due to an endianness error, they traveled for 0x10c years. Nobody found out the problem for two years, so a lot of travelers ended up in this situation. Actual time passed for the traveler was supposed to be a few minutes, but ended up being 10 hours, resulting in them missing their intended target by many miles.[107]
The DCPU-16: a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that could be used to control a player's entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish.[108] The DCPU-16 would still function while on fire, but slower and with the RAM changing randomly.[109] 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.[110] Computers would poll hardware 60 times per second, the same as the game's tick rate.[111] Computers would run at 100 khz.[112][113][114] A single ship would be able to support about three computers.[115] An open-source community-made operating system would be on the default computers.[116] 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.[50] Computers could have text-to-speech software.[117][118] Computers would come with a basic bootloader for loading and running programs.[119] DCPU emulation would run on separate server threads, with multiple DCPUs per thread.[120] Multiple computers could be networked together.[121]
The LEM1802 (Low Energy Monitor): a 128Γ96 pixel 16-color CRT monitor.[122] Clicking a keyboard or a monitor would lock input, turn the player's view towards the connected monitor, and slightly zoom in. Escape would exit.[123] Screen burn would be 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.[50]
Power generators. Each ship would have a generator capable of producing a fixed wattage, and everything players would connect to it would drain wattage.[124] 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.[67] Generators would not have required fuel,[125] would explode when destroyed,[126] and would emit light.[127]
Gravity generators. When a shipβs gravity generator is unpowered, objects inside the ship would be subject to the same physical forces as the ship itself.[67] Artificial gravity generators would recharge when hovering over a planet.[128] Rotation-produced artificial gravity would also be possible, as well as using magnetic boots to walk on surfaces in zero-gravity.[129] Constant acceleration could also be used to create artificial gravity.[130]
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.[131] Hyperverse communication would be very slow.[132]
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.[133]
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.[124]
Wires and other attachments that hang from the ceiling.[67] Wires would run electricity from the generator to other devices.[40]
Landing gear, which may break if a ship lands too hard.[67] Landing gear would need to be powered for it to work.[134]
Lights, which could be very bright, but would need to be dimmed to free up power or decrease visibility.[65][124]
The SPED-3 (Suspended Particle Exciter Display): a device that creates line-based holographic images.[135]
Buttons and knobs, which could have midi inputs mapped to them.[136]
Cooling systems, necessary for putting out fires.[8]
Components. 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.[67] 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.[140][146]
Modular guns, with cross compatible modules which could be found as loot,[147] with a total of "100 bazillion" guns.[148] These would include sniper rifles,[140] plasma pistols, and laser guns. Laser guns would cause the target to heat up before taking damage.[149] Weapons would consume power or ammunition when fired.[126]
1.44 megabyte 3Β½ inch floppy discs.[138] Players would be able to use other peopleβs programs on their shipβs computer by using these floppy discs.[67]
Batteries, which would store power produced by generators, and could be traded between players.[150]
Walkmans, for playing music, which would slow down when their battery is low.[151]
Duct tape, which would be able to fix anything for a limited amount of time.[152]
Flashlights, which could be used for spelunking and fixing broken ships.[153]
Magnetic boots, for walking on surfaces in zero-gravity.[129]
LP copies of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.[154]
According to Notch, the gameβs name was "intentionally bad" as a marketing experiment to see if Mojang could get away with naming their next game "pretty much anything".[155]
According to Notch, the original name for 0x10c was Dusk, referring to the dark, dying galaxy.[156]
"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.[157]
Another word for the number represented by the hexadecimal value "0x10c" is "Trillek".[158]
The sound of the weapon seen in some of the videos is taken from the blaster from the game Quake 2.[159]
Some of the videos from the gameβs development contain a low-poly model of the Soldier character from the game Team Fortress 2.[160][161]
The game was not planned to use alpha or beta labels,[162] with the first phase of development being referred to as "Montauk".[163]
According to Notch, 0x10c was inspired by Firefly, Elite, Alien, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, FTL, Noctis, and Proteus.[164][165][166][167][168]
The game was originally planned to use an emulated 6502 processor before Notch decided to create a fictional custom computer.[169][170][171]
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.