LE Minecraft Mod

[LukeTroy]

OK, I know this is crazy ambitious, and probably impossible, but I would love to see a mine-craft element in this game where you could build your own structures and dig your own mines/dungeons. There is already a mining/crafting element with the ore veins and blacksmithing, wouldn't it be awesome if you could buy a door or something that you could stick on a mountain side or just in the ground out in the wilderness (makes sense that you'd have to be out of town) which when you go into it just takes you into a small area with a torch and using a pick axe you could carve your way into it making your own dungeon/mine with procedurally generated monsters and maybe some caves with treasure chests and loot. Maybe even like procedurally generated Metroid style missions, with no one talking but signs and puzzles and stuff.

 

Then when you're done with that you can take out the materials that you've mined, or just buy them if you prefer and use them to build your own house, so that instead of houses, you buy empty plots of land that you're allowed to build on. Or you could build shelter in the wilderness or whole new cities if you wanted. For anyone that played Terraria, you'll know that NPC's showed up once you had built things with certain minimum requirements. How great would it be if you could build your own cities in the wilderness that over time generated a population. You could become the Jarl of you're own city and collect taxes and stuff. Then maybe you could engage in diplomacy, open trade routes, build armies and eventually maybe even war with other city states. Like I said this is an absurdly ambitious idea and I don't expect to see it happen in Skyrim, but maybe in Elder Scrolls VI or VII we might see stuff like this.

 

I just love the idea of The Elder Scrolls adopting more mechanics from games like Minecraft, The Sims, Civilization, Brutal Legend, Red Dead. For me the most exciting thing about The Elder Scrolls is the gigantic sandbox that may in the future be filled with many, many more different things to do to really make it feel like a world that you take a part in creating.

 

So does anyone think any of this might be possible once the creation kit comes out?

[PaladinRider]

It's somewhat possible and will be done, but it won't be like minecraft. I've never played minecraft but I think I understand the gist of it.

 

You cannot 'hack' away objects/mountains. This is why there's no structural/landscape damage. It's not like Red Faction (where you could blow apart the environment).

 

But there will be a mod where you can place buildings and other static objects to create your own city. I'm already planning to build a city mod myself, but it will be more quest-intensive - in that the buildings will be built via quest, and you won't be able to choose where to build the buildings (everything will already have a predetermined location). Instead I'm planning on focusing on the story and the background to this city, of which you will be the Jarl. You will have to find and build a primary resource to sustain your city, deal with bandits, protection, raise/lower taxes, and organize shipping/etc.

[LukeTroy]

Sounds really exciting dude, can't wait to see it. If I friend you can you let me know when it comes out, I assume it wont be for some time yet.

 

Also my mining idea involved creating new levels, so apart from the door, used as a gate way to the new map like with all the other dungeons, the main world wouldn't be affected. Also there wouldn't need to be new animations or anything, you would start of in just a very small space and the level would be filled with meter cubed blocks of terrain shaped objects that don't move and disappear when you hit them, some of which will contain ore to mine. I don't think that's impossible, depending on how well the game can deal with a billion individual blocks (If a cubic kilometer space is filled with cubic meter blocks) instead of one big block with some holes cut in it.

 

It would be great if someone could design textures to be rocky and uneven if not touching other blocks but flat if they are so it doesn't look like a perfectly carved out cube each time but it wouldn't be necessary. Then after that, if one could write some algorithms to carve out some underground caves, with randomly seeded monsters with some treasure chests and stuff. I think one of the most difficult parts would be in placing the blocks elsewhere in the dungeon, which one will need to do if they hope to build something that they are going to like, as it would need to snap to a grid for it to work at all.

 

If the whole 2 dimensional surface of the world, ignoring differences in altitude, could be mapped to a grid work of these kilometer cubed spaces, none of which come into existence until you place one of these portal doors on the ground (only allowable in non mountainous wilderness) or the walls and ceilings (only allowable at the edge of the underground spaces), one would be able to build giant tunnel networks all across Skyrim. The doorways don't have to be any good, maybe it would be easier just to have a black hole texture, and you could ignore all the existing dungeons and general height changes by just saying that they all start bellow the lowest altitude in the game for no real reason.

 

One big problem would be when you build a portal on the roof somewhere in the underground, since there would need to be a map of all the places you can and can't put one. It wouldn't necessarily be to hard (though quite laborious) for the cities and mountains, but once your getting down to streams and trees and just the little structures around Skyrim, it would be a really big job to work out everywhere you can and can't place a portal, hell it'll be pretty damn hard to do it even above ground. It would be the same 2d map of allowable spaces just placed over the ground of Skyrim and the ceiling of the underground. I don't know I'm not a modder, but to me that's probably the biggest deal breaker, but there's some very talented modders out there, maybe one of them will find a way to get around it.

[LukeTroy]

Wow that ended up being a long post. I really can't seem to help myself :P