Autism and Minecraft

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I'm curious... have you considered trying something like Terraria instead?

Terraria absolutely does have structure: Your end goal in the game is to take down the Moon Lord, the final boss. There's a general progression through the game overall that cant really be skipped very easily (or at all, in most cases)...

As an example, a new game tends to go like this early on, in terms of the goals that the game will hit you with:

1. Get basic materials to survive the first night. Make basic weapons. Maybe kill Eyes for lenses.

2. Explore the caves nearby a bit. Look for things like copper to make some basic armor. Search for treasure chests.

3. Build up your base a bit, to prepare some space for NPCs to live in (NPCs do all sorts of things for you, most often running lots of types of shops). Bases can be simple and small or complex as hell. They have ALOT more inherant practical use than those in Minecraft (which are more about the look than the function).

4. Once you've gotten at least some equipment that isnt bloody horrible, get all of the lenses that you need from the Demon Eyes.

5. Find a Demon Altar. Craft the Suspicious Eye.

6. Summon the Eye of Cthulhu, the first boss.

7. With the materials gotten from that boss, get the tools you need to destroy Shadow Orbs or Crimson Hearts, depending on which type appeared in your world.

8 . Explore the Corruption or Crimson (random as to which type you get; it's basically a type of "dungeon" area). Your goal is to find the orbs/hearts. Also, get better armor, the next bit hurts.

9. Set up an "arena" for the boss. You do NOT want to fight it on normal ground, because it'll eat your face.

10. Smash three Orbs or Hearts, summoning either the Eater of Worlds or Brain of Cthulhu (depends on Corruption or Crimson).

11. Materials gained from them allow you to progress towards the next tier of equipment (better mining tools can break more types of blocks, which is necessary to advance; better armor of course makes you less dead). Shortly after smashing the orbs/hearts, a meteor will strike somewhere in your world. Some powerful stuff can be gotten from these but dealing with them is a massive pain. They're optional, but you cannot stop one from appearing.

12. Locate the Dungeon (dont actually go inside). Set up an arena and fight Skeletron. Once he goes down, the Dungeon (which is full of useful stuff) can be explored. You need to have good equipment to deal with him though; not just because he hits hard, but also because he will insta-kill you if you do not defeat him before sunrise.

13. Fight the Queen Bee? This one's optional.

14. Head to the Underworld. Find the Voodoo Doll.

15. Summon the Wall of Flesh.



That's the route towards the game's first major goal; once the Wall is defeated, the world switches into "hardmode", and some sections of it transform, and a variety of new enemies appear, as well as new types of ores and items that you need to go further. You can start getting some pretty loopy stuff here.



Overall, the game tends to be like this. A general progression, HOWEVER, you have the option of branching off as you see fit to get other stuff. The game is extremely focused on exploration and combat; while it has Minecraft's digging/building/crafting, in an overall sense it's very similar to a Metroidvania game. It has alot of RPG elements too. Equipment has an affix system, like Diablo-style equipment (and there's an NPC that can reforge things for you, to work with that). There's an outright stupid number of items in the game to find and make (like, thousands), so every single playthrough is very different. And you can decide for yourself just how you want to approach your character's advancement, and what type of playstyle you want to use. You can use lots of melee, or maybe arrows, magic, even summoning minions. Among the gazillions of other things you can do. The game gives you TONS of reasons to want to explore, and monsters are pretty much constant. It's not like Minecraft where you can go for quite some time without running into any. Even during the day, there are things present. And sometimes events like a Goblin Invasion will happen. And there are LOTS of monster types, unlike Minecraft which actually has very few. Different biomes (or dungeon-type areas) will have different monsters in them. There are alot of bosses... the ones listed here are only the start. Overall there's a seriously absurd amount of content and things to do here.

So, it allows for alot of freedom (and building) like Minecraft, but provides a general structure of progression to go through the game, and elements of Metroidvania games are very prominent, the combat and exploration, and powering up your character. You start out pretty weak, but soon you'll start finding things that give you abilities like double jumping, wall climbing, the ability to instantly warp back home, or all sorts of things. Also unlike Minecraft once you've made a tool or piece of armor or whatever, they never break (it's hard to have a progression-based game if your helmet keeps shattering).

Currently in my own game I've defeated the Brain... which was all sorts of irritating (very nearly died there, it and it's bloody stupid teleporting attack phase)... and am now scouring the caves and other areas for items before going after Skeletron and the dungeon. And I FINALLY got the damn Goblin Tinkerer NPC, which had been one of my biggest goals due to the things he offers.

Hm, I've usually found grouping in a game like that to just be... a mess. Everyone wants to do something different and half the time you just get people screwing around rather than doing much of anything. In Terraria specifically you end up with just this confusing jumble, when it comes to any sort of combat.

That and it sucks the challenge out of whatever game it is. Well, usually.

Co-op in games as a whole is something I'll never understand. I only do it if I have no other choice or if a friend wont shut the hell up until I at least try it. They seem to have mostly given up lately though. Or I might do it if I'm *really* bored.


Only exception is Monster Hunter. For whatever reason grouping never irritated me nearly as much in that game. Though nobody seems interested in that anymore.


Something like Minecraft + Borderlands has probably already been done somewhere. Probably in Minecraft itself. If there's NOT a Diablo-ish giant freaking mod for it, I'd be very surprised at this point.

As for other games though, sadly, games like Diablo are quite rare right now... there are very few of them. There's Diablo of course (which people mostly whine about), Path of Exile (learning curve from hell), Marvel.... something, Grim Dawn, Borderlands, and... not much else. Nobody seems to make games of that genre anymore. Though Grim Dawn is very recent. And I agree that Borderlands would be better with randomized areas. I havent played all that much of it (when I played the first one a bit was right around the time when my arm went bad for the first time) but I do remember that the areas got WAY too repetitive because you knew where everything was all the time. There's a reason why Diablo-ish games usually go for randomization...

Someone doing a game like that though with added destructible terrain though would be a pretty freaking neat idea, I agree. Someone needs to make it happen!

I guess it's all in how you interpret it. You say there's no structure. I say there's nothing but structure. So the game doesn't give you context. So what?