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Roadmap

What's already in the pack is documented in Features. This page is the other half: the systems still planned but not yet built, drawn from the project's design vision. Nothing here is a committed timeline — features graduate from this page into the Features wiki as they ship.

The through-line is unchanged: vanilla Minecraft is a game about accumulation; Alone is a game about maintenance, with a long-horizon goal (the Dragon) that takes seasons to attempt.

Fire, heat & industry​

The campfire, the clay kiln (fires pottery), and the bellows-fed bloomery (smelts iron ore to a bloom) exist; the rest of the heat-tech tree does not yet.

  • A campfire menu. The campfire should open its own screen on right-click — a hearth interface with slots to lay food on to cook, tend the fuel, and set a pot to boil — rather than today's stack-items-on-top
    • hold-right-click interactions. Makes the fire a proper station you manage.
  • A pit / bowl furnace — the crudest smelting, below the built bloomery. IRL, before proper furnaces, metal was won in a clay-lined pit or bowl dug in the ground: layered with charcoal and (crushed) ore, covered, and force-fed air with bellows or a blowpipe until it burned hot enough to reduce the ore to a spongy bloom you then hammer. It's basically a hole-in-the-ground bloomery — smoky, inefficient, and the true start of metallurgy. Could slot in as a pre-bloomery copper tier (a dug pit you smelt in before you can build the clay {@code bloomery} already in the pack).
  • A charcoal clamp (bulk charcoal from a covered wood pile) — a batch-efficiency step up from what works today: smelting logs one at a time in a furnace already yields charcoal (as does a burnt-out campfire), so this is an optimisation, not a missing source.
  • A glass furnace and glass gating (below), above the kiln and bloomery already in the pack.
  • The ash economy: hardwood ash → lye → potash, feeding soap and glass flux.
  • Glass that gates itself behind forge heat + flux + lime, arriving late as the trophy it historically was.
  • A flint-and-pyrite fire tier shipped — the primitive strike-a-light between friction fire and the forged ferro rod. Pyrite turns up now and then when you sift gravel; craft it with a flint shard into a flint-and-pyrite striker that catches quick for almost no effort. Unlike the ferro rod its cooler spark still needs dry tinder, so it fails in the rain — that all-weather edge stays the ferro rod's. See Fire.
  • Candles & lanterns: cheap, short-lived tallow candles and permanent iron+oil lanterns above the burn-out torch, so deep caving becomes a light-supply problem.

Water​

  • Finite, flowing water with real currents (you can't swim up a waterfall; boats get swept).
  • Glass bottles and seawater distillation to reclaim fresh water from the sea (a condenser, not just evaporation). (Boiling seawater to dryness for salt has shipped — see Food Preservation.)

(Hot-rock boiling — heat stones in the fire and drop them into a hide/bark vessel that can't go over the flame — has shipped. See Water & Drinking.)

Food, farming & preservation​

  • Deeper fishing: bait shipped, plus tackle tiers and the right spots still to come (the rod is otherwise vanilla). Dig soil for worms and carry them while rod-fishing — each catch spends one to tempt an extra fish up, even from a thinning spot. (Finite, slow-recovering fish stocks shipped earlier — fish out a spot and the catches dry up until it recovers over the following days, so a small pond empties fast while a lake or the sea lasts; see Food & Eating.)
  • Purpose-built food stores: sealed barrels, hung caches, and smokehouses that beat the scent better than a plain chest. (The scent system has shipped — carried fresh meat draws wolves and polar bears, which will snatch it and bolt if they reach you, countered by preserving or caching it; see Food Preservation.)
  • Mushroom toxicity & identification: some foraged mushrooms are poisonous, learned by trial or study and then permanently marked in a foraging journal.

(Weeds & field tending has shipped — crops die to blight and winter frost, weeds sprout on the soil around a plot and choke the crop (and crops sow more weeds if you neglect them), so a field is upkeep you weed by hand, not a one-time build; trampling and farmland erosion are vanilla. See Farming with the seasons.)

Wildlife & hunting​

(Deer have shipped as the forest's proper wild game — skittish grazers that bolt and must be stalked or run down, spawning in forest/taiga/hill country, yielding venison and hide, counting toward overhunting, and breeding only outside winter — on placeholder (cow) art until a real deer model is made. Local overhunting and seasonal breeding shipped too: hunt a patch too hard and the game thins out until it recovers, and animals won't breed in the dead of winter. See Hunting & Wildlife.)

  • The trapping ladder shipped — passive food you set and leave, the way people live on Alone: the snare (free, passive, low-odds small game), the deadfall (baited, one-shot, better returns), and the fish trap / weir (passive fishing on the finite fish stock). All three are placed traps that keep working while you're away and draw on the local game/fish population; see Hunting & Wildlife.
  • More small game: grouse/ptarmigan and other birds could join the wild game later. (The vanilla rabbit and chicken and a new squirrel already behave as skittish wild game — bolt, tire fast, count toward overhunting, give a scrap of meat — and the squirrel climbs trees when you close on it; see Hunting & Wildlife.)
  • A wilderness that's actually wild — mostly shipped. The wild holds only wild animals now: domestic livestock (cow, pig, sheep, chicken) no longer spawn in the open — their natural spawns are held to villages, the same way hostiles are confined near structures — and two dangerous wild grazers fill the big-game niche: a bison that grazes plains/savanna in herds but charges and gores (and turns the whole herd on you) when provoked, and a wild boar that roots the forests and taiga and charges when cornered. So big-game meat and hide are huntable in the wild, but you earn them at real risk. See Hunting & Wildlife. Still to come: more biome-correct fauna — cold-country birds (grouse/ptarmigan) and other regional species — so the country you're in decides even more of what you can hunt.
  • More tracking sign: footprints and snow tracking, to follow quarry you can't see. (Persistence hunting, blood trails, and bleed-out have shipped, and now a prevailing wind — a steady direction each day that carries your scent, so a predator downwind finds you from far off and one upwind barely at all; see Hunting & Wildlife.)
  • Rendered tallow → candles shipped — the last piece of full-animal use. A blade kill on big game now yields raw fat; render it over a fire (campfire or furnace) into tallow, then cast it around a cordage wick (tallow + string) for a candle. So meat, hide, bone, sinew, marrow, brains, and fat all find a use. See Hunting & Wildlife.
  • Netting as a second counter to insect pressure shipped — a bug net woven from string + a fibre drawstring, worn on the head (in place of a helmet) to veil off the swarm anywhere, no fire needed. (Insect pressure near standing water — countered by a smudge fire — and insect-borne fever (sustained unprotected exposure in humid wetlands can give you the sickness illness) shipped earlier; see World & Seasons.)

Building & shelter​

  • The shelter ladder: light stick-frame blocks (that weather and can be broken by a bear), through log and stone tiers.
  • A shown Shelter Quality rating — a readout of how good your shelter is. (The mechanic behind it has shipped: how enclosed you are grades your temperature protection, which in turn feeds sleep recovery; see Body Temperature.)
  • Felling real trees: cut through the base and the tree falls as an entity (and can crush you), with sapling → young → mature → old-growth age states that scale a tree's height, chop time, and yield (an old-growth giant worth several times a young one).

(Structural gravity — loose soil falls and must be shored with timber or rammed earth (the tamp tool) — and fire spread — an open campfire catches wood it touches — have all shipped. See Weight, Carrying & Blocks and Fire.)

Transport​

The backpack, the travois/sledge (a dragged cargo frame), and rivers as highways (loose logs and light goods float downstream) exist; the rest of the logistics tree is planned.

  • Wheelbarrow, rafts and boats, pack animals, and the big unlock — a horse + cart whose demands make road-building emergent gameplay — up to rails as the endgame.

The world & navigation​

  • Weather with teeth: storms that fray builds. (Blizzards — a winter storm freezes the exposed fast (see Body Temperature) — and telegraphed fronts — the sky gives you a lead warning of a coming storm so you can get under cover, your fire covered, and your drying meat in — have both shipped. Drought is folded into the farming crops-dry-out mechanic.)
  • Biome strategies — each biome a different opening hand.
  • A wind indicator on the HUD shipped — a north-up wind vane under the temperature square: a needle pointing the way the wind blows, its length the wind's strength (a stub on a calm day, a long needle in a gale). Read straight off the world clock client-side. The old "you feel the wind" chat notes are now gone — the vane replaces them.
  • Navigation without coordinates: a craftable compass, hand-drawn maps that fill as you walk, celestial direction, and cairns. Getting lost becomes possible.

Structures, loot & the old world​

  • Structure-scoped loot with relics — the uncraftable top of the ladder (artifacts that act like enchantments, true potions, golden apples).
  • Rationalized mob drops (the good gear is in the chests, not the corpses).
  • Redstone gated behind found engineering plans.
  • Villager barter and reputation, and hired villagers you pay in food.
  • Village guards — armed defenders (bow and sword) that hold a village. Steal from or strike anything in the village and the whole place turns on you — guards close in, tactically (this is the real home for the cover / advance-under-fire AI first tried on the iron golem). A village becomes a guarded settlement to raid or trade with, not a free larder.
  • Diamonds repurposed: not armour (that's abolished) but diamond-tipped picks and saws that cut faster and cleaner, and an elite trade good in their own right.

The body & combat​

  • A real calorie model. Today hunger is vanilla food + saturation, with fatigue/stamina and a cold-food-burn bolted alongside. A truer model would track calories in vs out: food carries an energy value, and you spend energy on a basal rate plus activity (walking < sprinting < mining/chopping < swimming) and thermoregulation (already gestured at — a cold body burns more). Then starving, freezing, and overworking all draw on the same honest ledger, and a hard day's labour genuinely needs feeding. Big, and it wants care so it deepens the survival loop without turning into spreadsheet micromanagement.
  • Digestion & sanitation: a latrine/contamination system where fouling your own camp or water source sickens you. (Dysentery — the acute dehydration emergency from drinking foul water — has shipped; see Injuries & Conditions.)
  • Combat depth: deeper melee than trade-blows. (Pieces shipped: the spear as king of the early game — a flint spear with real thrusting reach; shields defeated by large creatures: bracing a shield against a bear, ravager, golem, or the warden gets it bashed aside — knocked down for a few seconds so the follow-up lands; and a shield tier ladder — a woven wicker shield (day-one) → a wooden plank shield → the metal vanilla shield, each sturdier and harder to bash aside, though no tier lets you turtle against a bear. See Hunting & Wildlife. You can turn a blade, not a charging bear.)

Crafting & labour​

  • Work sessions — the honest speedup: big items (a dugout canoe, a timber frame) are multi-day projects you actively engage to enter a time-compressed "spent the afternoon on it" mode — meters keep draining, and a nearby event (a predator, a storm) interrupts you. The engine that makes days of labour playable without either tedium or a free instant craft.

Livestock & economy​

  • Domesticated animals as bartered wealth, priced in grain — earned through many harvests, never spawned or found wild.
  • Village livestock. With domestic animals now gone from the open wild (done — see Hunting & Wildlife), the place you meet a cow, sheep, or chicken is a village — the settlement's own herd. So beef, wool, and cow-hide leather are things you trade for, tend, or raid, not free wilderness drops. Pairs with the planned armed village guards (steal or strike anything and the village turns on you), making a livestock raid a real, dangerous option rather than a free lunch.
  • Tanning — leather is made, not dropped (shipped). Butchering a hide-bearing animal now yields a green raw hide (plus a lump of brains), not finished leather. Leather is worked on the drying rack — the very same lashed frame that cures jerky, doing double duty: load a raw hide + brains and it brain-tans into leather over ~three in-game days (about twice its meat-cure), not a hold-right-click hand chore. So a leather coat is a real investment, in keeping with the pack's "everything is real effort" rule. See Hunting & Wildlife. Possible refinements: alternative tannins (bark liquor), a scraping/dehairing sub-step, and smoking to finish — deeper realism if it earns its keep.

The start — extending the loadout​

The Alone-style start is built — you wake with nothing, read your biome, and pick two items from an approved list (see The Start — Your Loadout for how it plays). What remains here is ways to extend it:

  • Graphical selection screen — a proper picker window over the existing command/clickable-chat loadout (same underlying picks, biome read, and one-time gate).
  • More list options to build: a slingshot shipped — the low-power ranged weapon below the bow: draw and loose a foraged loose rock to drop small game (rabbit/chicken/squirrel), useless on anything big; see Hunting. Still to build — and, deepening existing systems — a frying pan (better cook surface) and a bar of soap (better/faster washing). (Shipped: the gill net (open-water fishing; see Hunting), the hand saw (fast log→plank; see Tools & Crafting), the towel (instant dry-off; see Body Temperature), and the grain→bread path (grind → dough → bake; see Food & Eating).)
  • Decided against: a personal photograph / morale system — Alone's realism here is physical, and a happiness meter would be a HUD abstraction rather than a felt mechanic, so it's deliberately not built.

Playtest follow-ups​

Concrete items raised in playtest, still to do (each is removed from here and folded into the feature docs once it ships). Recently cleared: the gravel-flint place-and-break exploit, no throwing a rock while crouched, timed-craft repeats no longer instant, guards now chase at sprint pace, the Alone: Cinematic submodule (a biome/day reveal on a cooldown), the timed-craft take (server-authoritative), drinking-water temperature (your core drifts toward the water you drink), trampling crops now angering the village, and villager/guard body drops (meat, fat, hide, brains, bone), the free-climb one-block grab (a lone step is only a jump now — and you can no longer cling while stood on the ground), tool hand-orientation (item/handheld; flint hatchet re-oriented blade-forward), and a realism verification pass on hydration/dehydration (rule-of-3s on the in-game clock; ~3 game-days at rest, faster sprinting/roasting; empty reserve kills over ~100s), food-sickness (food→hunger, water-dysentery→thirst; real-time, not rest-shortened by design), and the endurance bar (free jog, ~40s sprint, sleep-cleared fatigue ceiling) — all confirmed true to scale, and a realistic campfire fire economy (a log is ~2 MC-hrs not 6, mass-consistent plank/stick ladder, and a spent fire now leaves charcoal in proportion to the wood it burned — at open-fire efficiency, ~1 lump per two logs, since most wood burns clean to ash), the retirement of the craftable cobblestone furnace (heat-tech is clay-built now — campfire → brick kiln → refractory bloomery; glass moved to the kiln, which is the realistic silica heat), and a verification of the crafting-table path (log→planks is riven/sawn by hand, no grid shortcut; the flint riving tool is 2×2-craftable so there's no table chicken-and-egg — all true to real woodworking), and a fence/gate carry-weight fix (their thin posts slipped under the block-density threshold and read as a near-weightless 0.05 kg — now weighted by the wood they're built from, a fence ~2 kg, a gate ~3.5 kg), two-person boats done right (see Boats — a dugout canoe you hollow from a real log by char-and-scrape; vanilla boat crafting disabled so the dugout is the only path; stamina- paddling where two paddlers share the effort and cruise faster), desert nights turning cold (arid radiative cooling — no more overheating after dark in the sand), a boat-boarding fix (an entity under the crosshair owns the click, so boarding a boat on water no longer reads as drinking), and sugar-cane / bamboo carry weight+volume (their full-height outline no longer reads as a ~9 kg, half-your-pack stone).

(No open playtest items right now — the list above is caught up.)

Death, respawn & run modes​

  • Hardcore-Alone run modes: self-set victory conditions (survive the winter, survive a year, slay the Dragon) with a tap-out stat screen — the framing that turns the sandbox into a run. (The carried-home death model has shipped — you wake days later, wounded, hungry and weak, with your gear left where you fell and its meat drawing scavengers, not a corpse-run.)

The endgame​

  • The Dragon as a multi-season expedition: the Nether as a heat-and-no-water death zone, obsidian hauling as real logistics, and a supply line running through structures you've cleared.

Looking for the technical build log of what's shipped? It lives in the repository's Git history and the Engineering section, not here.