BitCraft Gets Technical About Its Terraforming System And First Alpha Test

A new year has officially started and the BitCraft dev team is celebrating the occasion with an extremely technical blog on the game’s building and terraforming system, and an even more technical video on its first alpha test. Yay!

First up is the blog which goes into specific detail about how the game world is generated. In case you’re wondering, the landscape is formed using millions of hexagonal pillars, instead of the traditional voxel cubes, with varying materials, textures, and elevations that form mountains, gullies, plains, and even bodies of water. Players can also modify these hexagons to terraform the environment to their needs.

They can also change the character of the terrain even further and make them functional using the paving system. “This is essentially like adding material on top of terrain,” Clockwork Labs explained. “Paving takes both time and resources to place, so paving out the surface area of a large village or making a road between two towns is going to be a large endeavor that could take coordination of a large group a long time to complete.”

The team says that the entire system is still a work in progress and that they’ll be looking into adding more structures or buildings that will allow players to traverse various types of terrain easier. That includes ramps, bridges, stairs, ladders, and maybe even elevators.

Meanwhile, Clockwork is gearing up for the sandbox MMORPGs first alpha test early this year. Alpha testing will be open to a larger group of testers and will run for significantly longer than last year’s pre-alpha tests and are expected to run for at least a month. The team promises a plethora of game improvements, including revamped biomes, a new core skill, a six-tier progression system, better character control, as well as ambient music and sound effects, all of which are touched on in the technical vlog below.