Saw this on PC Gamer and it doesn’t seem to be spreading as quickly as most Notch News does.

The quick hit is that Notch (of Minecraft fame) has started working on a space trading sandbox game “that’s more like Firefly” and he invokes that holiest of space games, Elite, when talking about it.

PC Gamer says Notch is planning to begin work on it this summer but Shacknews followed up the story, linking to a tweet where Notch says work has already begun.

While I’m excited any time a game developer mentions Elite, some of what Notch mentioned (“I want to run around on my ship and have to put out a fire. Like, oh crap, the cooling system failed, I have to put out the fire here.“) immediately started me thinking about the Kickstarter-infused FTL.

But that’s OK…there’s room in the world for 2 new space-based sandbox games!

There’s been a lot of crafting talk lately. And a little bit of discussion around how rigid (my term) MMOs tend to be.

Angela was checking out this thread on the EQ2 boards and I asked her to send it to me. It’s a guild hall turned into a circus, built of crafted and collected items. The ‘figures’ are all quest rewards, I’m sure. But the structures are all creations made of crafted items.

I realize to a lot of people stuff like this is “pointless” but to another lot of people, stuff like this is what makes MMOs magical. Preemptively cutting off the nay-sayers, the point isn’t about quality of graphics or that the elephant’s foot doesn’t intersect perfectly with the ball he’s standing on. The point is the ‘sandbox’ aspect that allows people to come up with original crazy ideas, and execute on them.

Anyway, here’s the link:

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=446678