I don't really agree with you about what many of the problems with minecraft are[…]

I would like to know what problems you have with it anyways. I want to collect all the problems people have with it first and sort through them later.

[…]how software should even be structured in general[…]

I feel like you're referring back to a previous conversation, but i can't remember which; could you please remind me?

[…]or why people play video games at all.

Personally, i play video games for fun. Therefore, i think it would make the most sense for this project to prioritize fun above all else. This is what i intend to do. If the consensus of the populace is that doing something would be the most fun, that's what should be done; if everybody's saying that something isn't fun, it should be removed; if experiments reveal that people find something more fun than expected, that should influence the decisions.

A bit of a tangent… There's this other game i know of, called Cataclysm: Bright Nights. It's a fork of another game called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. C:BN was made because a bunch of people all agreed that C:DDA was prioritizing realism over gameplay too much. So they decided to make a fork that prioritized gameplay instead, and they've written a bunch of their principles in a document [here](https://github.com/cataclysmbnteam/Cataclysm-BN/wiki/Design-document). Now, not all of this document is relevant to the relationship between this project i've started and Minecraft, but some of it certainly is, and i definitely agree with a lot of the principles that this document lays out. (Important note that would be irresponsible not to mention: The C:BN community is toxic in some ways, and the fact that i agree with the design principles they laid out in this particular document should not be interpreted as a praise of everything surrounding the game.)

I also aim to create a minecraftlike[…]. I haven't, however, made very much progress at all on my own project, so regardless of the direction of your project, I probably wouldn't be of much help anyway.

That's okay. I'm not going to force anybody to help me with this. I'll be happy with any help people are able to provide, and i'm saying that genuinely, not saying it out of cultural expectations of politeness. (I'm curious about what you specifically mean by the design goals you listed, though.)

my project doesn't aim to replace minecraft. I don't really think that goal makes sense, and I don't think such a goal would result in an actually good game. if you make a new game, it's a new game. a game which is different does not replace minecraft by definition.

Perhaps i stated my goal wrong. Maybe a better way to phrase it would be that i want to create a game that's better at being Minecraft than Minecraft is. Or perhaps i could say that there's a certain happy feeling i used to have when playing Minecraft when i was youngerand less disillusioned with the world, and i want to be able to recreate that feeling. Or perhaps i could say that i don't like the way that Microsoft is maintaining Minecraft, and i'm frustrated with it and think that it would be better if it was maintained by the community. Or perhaps i could say that i think that Minecraft always had the potential to be good, and that's why people played it, but it never reached that potential, and i want to create something that does.

Maybe one of these makes it more clear what i want to work towards. Maybe they don't, and i'm just waxing poetical in the blindness of nostalgia. Truthfully, i don't even really know what i was saying just then; sometimes i just don't understand myself. But i hope that i was in some way able to say something that made my thoughts more clear.

you don't seem to comprehend that people want to play different kinds of games at different times, as when I pointed this out to you before, you called it "addiction to novelty".

I don't remember if that's what i said or meant when i used the phrase "addiction to novelty", but i don't think that's how i'd use the term now. When i refer to an addiction to novelty, i refer to a specific practice in the development of video games where updates are made that only or mostly focus on adding in new things while not working on fixing up the old things, making sure the old things work with the new things, or even really caring about the new things at all. If one were to stick with one update of these games forever, they probably would get rather bored of it rather quickly, because there isn't an incentive to make deep, rich mechanics that you can always find new and interesting things in when there's going to be another batch of new crap thrown at you in a year or so to satiate any boredom that might crop up anyway.

In contrast, a well-designed game would, to me, not be like this. To me, a well-designed game would be one where a few simple, basic building blocks (metaphorical) synergize together in a multitude of ways so that even if the basics never change, there's always something new and interesting and exciting and fun to discover by combining the basics in new ways. And there are definitely examples of this being pulled off. Consider the board game Catan, for instance: it's pretty simple and easy to learn, yet masterfully designed in such a way that it's very difficult for it to get old. Or consider the board game Go, a game that's been entertaining people for millennia and still has new things to discover. Something like this is the type of video game i want to create.

it would be a different story if the goal was to attempt to reimplement minecraft as an open source piece of software, which would be venerable.

This is not a goal of this project i've created. I do not want to reimplement Minecraft; i want to make something better than it.