Build
Dig, gather, and put the world back together the way you want it. One block per square, everywhere, so what you build is what you meant.
In development — not yet available to play
A cozy voxel world, where the things in it are made by the people playing.
Voxhearth is a survival and building game for Mac and iPad. You gather what is around you, plant a garden, and build somewhere to live. What is different is where the stuff comes from: players make new items from inside the game, and once one is made, everyone on that world can use it.
The game
A quiet world you settle into
If you know Minecraft, Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing, you already know the register. Voxhearth is cozy, not frightening. There is no story to keep up with and nothing to be scored on — you dig, you plant, you build, and you keep the place.
The world is made of blocks, one block to a square, going out as far as you want to walk. You break blocks and they go in your bag; you place them back and they come out of it. Underneath there is stone and ore; on top there is soil you can turn into a garden.
Grow
Turn soil into farmland, plant what you have, and come back to it. Crops grow on their own schedule whether you are watching or not.
Play together
Open your own world to the people on your home network and they join it from the room next door. Your world stays your world.
Why it is different
The items come from the players, not from us
In most games, a new item exists because someone who works on the game added it. In Voxhearth, a new item exists because someone playing it made one — sitting in the world, on the same machine, in the same session.
Model it
Every item is a small voxel sculpture on a 32 by 32 by 32 grid. You place coloured cubes until it looks like the thing you meant, then set how big it should be when you hold it — a carrot is not a chest.
Say what kind of thing it is
Pick whether it is a tool, a crop, a food, something you place, or something purely decorative. Each kind asks you a short list of questions — how many stages does the crop grow through, what does harvesting it give you — and fills in the rest.
Give it something to do
If you want it to actually do something, you write a few lines of Lua for it. That part is optional, and it is a real, small programming language rather than a toy one. Scripts run on the server inside a sandbox with a strict budget, so a mistake in one item cannot take the world down with it.
It is not modding. There is no separate editor to download, no file to copy into a folder, and no restarting the game. You make the thing where you are standing, and it is in the world. Everyone playing on that world gets it too — including the people who were not there when you made it.
For parents
The short version, plainly
Voxhearth is a building-and-farming game that a father is making with his own children, and it is built for the way a family actually plays. Your children do not need an account and are never asked to make one — the name a child plays under is a label saved on their own iPad or Mac, not a record kept on our servers. There is nothing to buy inside the game, no advertisements, and this website does not track you: it is plain text and pictures, with no scripts and nothing loaded from anyone else. Children play at home, on your own network, joining a world one of you is running — you do not have to put them on a public server with strangers to let them play together. When the game is eventually finished and sold, one adult buys it once and it works on several of the family's devices, and if a device is replaced you can move it over rather than buying again.
We deliberately never learn that a child exists. That is not an oversight we intend to fix later — it is the reason there is nothing about your children to leak, lose, or be asked to hand over.
Where it runs
Mac and iPad
This is a small project with one person building it, so it runs well in a few places rather than badly in many.
- Mac
- Apple Silicon. Plays on its own and can host a world for the house.
- iPad
- Including older ones. The oldest iPad in the author's house is a target, not an afterthought.
- Windows
- Not supported, on purpose. Saying otherwise later would be easier than doing it properly, so it is not being said now.
- Android
- Possible one day. Not promised, and not being worked on.
Where the project is
Still being built
Voxhearth is in development. There is no download, nothing for sale, and no signup — not even a mailing list, because there is nowhere yet for one to send you. This page exists so that the game has an address before it has an audience.
When there is something to play, it will be here first.