[2023] Why even have voxels?

I disagree that mining is useless. It’s not necessary, with alternative play styles being viable. But I always wind up making one or more mines to acquire large quantities of minerals. And while some will find it tedious no matter what, I enjoy the layers to mining now required to achieve peak efficiency.

However, it is my personal belief that if the devs were to do it all again, they wouldn’t go with a voxel world. I agree that it is simply baked into this game, and TFP will just endeavor to make the best of that early decision.

Voxels are a tradeoff; there’s no way around it. And to this day, not everyone gets that. Some still ask why this game doesn’t look as good or perform as well as non-voxel games. ‘Because of voxels’ doesn’t have to satisfy everyone to still be valid.

The other thing I’ll say about voxels is, I feel the game is still scratching the surface, literally. We used to have randomly generated caves, which are such an obvious, interesting use of all that randomly generated, 3D voxel space under our feet. Now that the game has better occlusion, visual feedback for structural integrity, and a more finalized system for placing POIs around roads, I’d sure like to see caves make a return. Not pre-made POI caves that any game could do, but different-every-time caves, to take advantage of the voxel world.

Many people have an everyday base with all their loot and crafting stations and then a separate horde base where they face off against the horde. For that style of play, an underground everyday base is still very viable and fun to have and excavate. People worry about the digging zombies but honestly without the blood moon gps abilities of normal everyday zombies you really are quite safe in an underground base seven days and six nights of the week.

I understand what the OP is saying about how the game doesn't seem to highlight its own voxel nature but seems to exist in spite of it. I would like to see more mechanics and features in the game that take advantage of its voxel nature and hopefully they will explore that once they release the game to 1.0 status.

For now, they need to just finish the missing features and get the game optimized and polished and released. Then they can do updates much like minecraft has done that can add content to under ground and under water exploration in a way only a voxel environment can deliver.