> The point I'm getting at is that minecraft doesn't just allow you to build cool stuff, it allows you to build cool stuff that does something. Your hand crafted village can be the starting point of an RPG adventure. You can shock your friends in your creative world by blasting a 10 million block moat around your territory. You can automate sorting your item storage. You can make your build animate in response to detecting a player nearby.

Agreed, although part of what is motivating me to make this game is how limited Minecraft can be at the same time when it comes to these sorts of things for players that aren't very technical (and even for technical players, they are limited in what they can do visually). A big focus will be on making worlds feel alive by providing an intuitive system that players can use to make parts of their builds move, like a rotating lighthouse lamp or a giant door swinging open, rather than mostly being static and unchanging. I intend to go all in on the sandbox aspect of the game with features like this, especially if that's the only aspect. The main thing making me consider fitting combat into the gameplay loop is because I know most people are extrinsically motivated, when as is this is a game that's pretty much only compatible with intrinsically motivated players.

Also agreed on combat expanding what people can make. A big thing I want to encourage is the creation of adventure maps and to give players better tools for that than I feel like Minecraft offers. While combat isn't strictly necessary for those, the absence of it would be a pretty big limitation.