This man would like to take you to space.

Notch hinted not too long ago that his next game would be set in space, an idea that undoubtedly sent minds racing as to what kinds of crazy crap the Minecraft creator might come up with when working within the boundless stretches of the universe at large. Still, I doubt anything was expecting anything quite this specifically bonkers.

0x10c is the name of Notch's next game, a space-faring "hard science fiction" game that puts players in the role of one of many human astronauts from an alternate universe where the space race never ended. As the back story here goes... you know what? Let's just use Notch's own words.

In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years.

It's now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy.

Get all that? I hope so, because I don't think I'm smart enough to dissect it any further.

Players will control a ship that works via a generator with a fixed wattage. Certain technologies will require a bigger drain on your ship's generator than others. Notch cites the example of a cloaking device, which would require so much power that you'd have to shut down most computer systems and dim the lights just to make it work correctly.

The on-board computer you'll be using is "a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU" that you can use to control all your ship's functions. Notch plans to release full specs for the computer soon.

As for actual gameplay, Notch promises everything from lots of engineering and advanced economy systems to full-on combat against AI and rival player ships. You can see the full breadth of what Notch has thus far announced at the official 0x10c website. Similar to Minecraft, Notch plans to release an early version of the game publicly in order to have players help shape the ultimate direction of the final product.