VoXide

A Minecraft-style survival sandbox for the PlayStation 1, written in Rust on top of the PSoXide SDK.

The world is chunked and streamed. Chunks are 16x16x64 and recentre on the player as you walk, so it never runs out. Terrain comes from seeded fixed-point noise, which gives biomes, caves, ore banded by depth, lava pockets and a sea level, with trees scattered on top of that.

From there it's most of the survival loop: mining and placing, crafting, furnace smelting, hunger and health, farming, fluids that flow, fire that spreads, animals you can breed and hostiles that come out at night, XP and enchanting, and two other dimensions, the Inferno and the Void, if you build the portals.

Some things work differently to Java, deliberately. Crafting is a tabbed recipe book rather than a 2x2/3x3 grid, because placing items into a grid with a d-pad is worse than picking what you want to make; Minecraft's own console editions made the same call. Tools have no durability and aren't selected by hand: the game equips the best of each and uses whichever suits the block you're aiming at. There's no music. Structures, falling sand, boats and rails, hoppers and signs aren't in yet.

Performance is the part worth talking about on this hardware. Detailed terrain draws 16 blocks ahead and 14 to the sides, projected on the GTE, using 2D greedy meshing over cached per-chunk face pools that only rebuild the planes an edit actually touches.

What that costs depends entirely on what is in front of you, and the honest number is 20fps in the grassy, tree-and-flower terrain the game spawns you into. The same renderer holds a locked 30fps in sparse terrain: the sandier spawn it used to ship measures exactly that on the same route. So roughly a third of the frame budget goes on trees and ground plants, and vegetation won that trade on purpose, because a green world looks like the game it is nodding to and a beige one does not.

What limits draw distance is the cost of projecting faces, not memory. I tried imposters for the far ring and pulled them back out after measuring that they drew no visible pixels.

Every asset is CC0. Block art is the "16x16 Block Texture Set" from OpenGameArt, quantised to per-block CLUTs by tools/convert_pack.py; tiles the pack doesn't cover are drawn in code. Sources are credited in assets/pack/CREDITS.md and on the in-game credits screen. No Mojang assets, code or data are used.

Play it

The disc image is on itch.io. VoXide also ships on the PSoXide Demo Disc with nine other programs, and that disc runs in your browser on the PSoXide page, no console needed.

Build

VoXide uses the PSoXide SDK as Cargo path dependencies, so the two checkouts have to sit side by side:

git clone https://github.com/EBonura/PSoXide.git
git clone https://github.com/EBonura/voxide.git
cd voxide && make

make compile      # PSX-EXE only
make disc         # dist/voxide.cue + dist/voxide.bin
make install      # copy the disc into the local game library
make smoke        # boot through PSoXide headless and write captures/

The build needs a nightly Rust toolchain (pinned by rust-toolchain.toml, which also pulls rust-src for the mipsel-sony-psx target) and Python 3 for the asset cooks in tools/.

Controls

The layout follows Minecraft Bedrock's PS4/PS5 defaults.

• Left stick: move (forward/back + strafe); D-pad works as a fallback (up/down walk, left/right turn)
• Right stick: turn and look
• Cross: jump; hold it in water to swim up; in creative fly (toggled in the options menu) Cross rises and Circle sinks
• Circle: hold to sneak (slow, and you will not walk off a ledge); backs out of any menu
• Square: pocket crafting (planks, sticks, torches, the crafting table); everything else needs a placed crafting table, opened with L2, as in the original. L1/R1 page the category tabs (blocks, gear, items, food), D-pad selects, Cross crafts, Triangle hides what you lack materials for; Square also withdraws inside the chest/furnace panels
• Triangle: inventory panel, opened on the item in hand (Cross equips); shows what you own by default, Square switches to the full catalogue
• L2: use -- interact with the targeted mob or block (chest, furnace, bed, enchant table, door), otherwise place/use the held block or item (bow, bucket, wheat, ...); sneak + L2 force-places
• R2: tap to attack, hold to mine the targeted block (time scales with hardness and tool)
• L1 / R1: hotbar previous/next (9 slots, wraps; an empty slot is an empty hand)
• L3 or double-tap forward: sprint (drops when forward stops)
• Start: options menu -- flight, save/load to memory card, the tutorial toggle, and the stick and volume settings (left/right adjusts those)
• Main menu: up/down moves between PLAY GAME, NEW WORLD, SETTINGS and CREDITS; Cross confirms

A first run walks you through the basics with a chain of hint toasts: look, move, jump, chop a tree, craft planks, craft a table, place it, open it, then make a pickaxe. OPTIONS > TUTORIAL turns it off.

There are four tools, a pickaxe, axe, shovel and sword, each crafted per tier from wood up to diamond. They aren't cycled or selected: there's no durability, a better one auto-equips, and the game picks whichever suits the block under your crosshair, so the slot beside the hotbar changes as you look around. Using the right tool is what makes a block break quickly; the wrong one works at bare-hand pace. Only a pickaxe of the right tier will yield ore, and melee damage comes from the sword.

Holding up or down in any menu autorepeats after a beat.

The HUD carries hearts, hunger, air bubbles, armour pips, the XP bar and the hotbar. Mining draws crack stages on the block itself rather than a progress bar.

Credits

Everything shipped here is CC0 (public domain). assets/pack/CREDITS.md has the per-sound breakdown and the links; the short version:

• Block textures are the "16x16 Block Texture Set" from OpenGameArt.
• Sound effects come from Kenney (Impact Sounds, RPG Audio, Interface Sounds) and from freesound.org, where the recordings are by qubodup, Zozzy, sqeeeek, MBPL, OwNathan, Kneeling, Reitanna and swordofkings128.
• The SDK is PSoXide, which provides the GPU, GTE, SPU, pad, memory-card and CD layers this game is built on.

Tiles the texture pack doesn't cover (the crafting table, chest, tool icons, crack overlays and mob faces) are drawn procedurally in game/src/tex.rs, and the sound bank is cooked to SPU-ADPCM by tools/convert_sfx.py.

Provenance

VoXide is developed with substantial AI assistance, with a human directing the architecture, debugging and hardware verification. This is disclosed openly and is not a clean-room claim. The same holds for the SDK underneath it; see PSoXide's own provenance note.

Trademark

VoXide is an original implementation inspired by Minecraft. It ships no Mojang assets, code or data, and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or associated with Mojang Studios or Microsoft. Minecraft is a trademark of Mojang Studios.