Allumeria: a Promise to the World of Voxel Sandboxes?

Allumeria (started in 2025) is a game whose official demo launch sure caused waves, announced during January to be playable near Steam Next Fest… [1] Until a DMCA later withdrawn by the giant of all sandboxes, Microsoft, having acquired Minecraft (2009) in 2014 for 2,5 billions USD [2]. This resulted in a couple of articles released, in an indie David versus Goliath instance of Streisand effect (“a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information”, “Streisand effect”, Wikipedia, 2 May 2007 – 1 March 2026) [3].

Apparently, Tracer AI is being blamed, an artificial intelligence service for copyright management that has sent such DMCA requests to developers of other voxel games [4]. And yet, the game feels closer to Terraria with PvE elements, trinkets that unlock core gameplay features such as a glider, sprint or sneak…

This article is going to:

• Take a dive into the event and the stakes at play, including responses by various actors;
• Then, it is going to linger a bit more on Allumeria as a case study of a crossing between Terraria (2011) and Minecraft.
• Before taking more time to establish a genealogy of sorts for the gaming subgenre of sandboxes.
• A glossary alongside a bibliography will then clarify some of the terms in this article.

Update: The DMCA launched against Allumeria has been withdrawn. As Unomelon wrote on the Allumeria Discord, “Microsoft has withdrawn the copyright claim with no action needed on my part. This is the best case scenario. I just woke up from a nap so I am still not sure about the details, but whatever happened, it worked. The steam page and game has been fully restored, and I did not need to file a counter claim, meaning there will be no chance of a lawsuit!”

Original story: In January, indie game developer Unomelon announced that their lo-fi voxel sandbox game Allumeria would be playable in Steam Next Fest, an exciting milestone after a year of development. Two weeks later, the game is no longer available on Steam as the result of a DMCA takedown from Microsoft, claiming that Allumeria infringes on Minecraft’s copyright.

By Wes Fenlon. Contributions from Christopher Livingston last updated 11 February 2026. “Microsoft has revoked the DMCA takedown that forced an indie Minecraft-like off Steam”, PC Gamer. [1]

But apparently, there have been precedents for the Tracer AI service to hunt down other voxel sandboxes. In an unlisted YouTube video, Daniel P. H. Fox uses title “Mojang killed my voxel game.” [5], on June 13th, 2025, and talks about how a game he made, as a “technical demonstration of a voxel engine running on Roblox [2003]”. Tracer was already the service at play here in sending the DMCA, despite the developer making everything he could to not infringe on any copyright whatsoever. Well, he did say he’d try to use this project to give the game a life of its own regardless of DMCA under the name Daydream, so there goes that?

The stakes of this incident for Allumeria, then, are at least threefold.

• First and foremost, it is a major game studio (Mojang), and behind it one of the few oligopolistic Big Tech companies (Microsoft), against indie creators and an use of lawsuits as threats into stifling the gaming industry from the voices of newcomers, heightening the entry barrier to the industry and thus attacking entrepreneurship freedom — one of the conceptual arguments behind capitalism in a free market (and it comes from a communist).
• Secondly, the use of artificial intelligence for this kind of labor, copyright management and anything to do with legal claims, poses ethical questions. Should artificial intelligences be able to impact the lives of people in so great a decision as to a DMCA takedown request, with on it looming the possibility of future lawsuits?
• At last, and this will echo with the first point though it is meant only artistically, not about economics!, the stifling of the videogaming voxel sandbox subgenre itself. It is one of the formulas that gamers enjoy as a possibility to express oneself through building, exploring, role-playing upon a white canvas, but also confronting oneself to procedurally generated indefinities! (That is, when such mechanisms are coded into the game, sandboxes don’t necessarily need procedural generation.)

But this is kind of wrong to say it’s Mojang’s fault and I did specify several actors. One of the major names to know in Minecraft history is Jeb… Or Jens Bergensten, there since Notch was on the team! A *Bluesky screenshot shows him and Unomelon *apparently contacting one another [6].

For the sake of giving justice to Mojang, however, there has historically been a reason for copyrights to come to exist. In feudalism, art was reserved for an elite of patrons. Hence the etymology for Patreon, though this service democratizes this practice and therefore is closer to capitalism, as in decentralized offer that caters to particular niches. Because creators can make money, the reasoning is that the industry can be a sustainable one, for people to work on games all their career, so that experience culminates in highly specialized, sophisticated, well-crafted products.

One of the bad things that come with this, however, is that competition becomes a critical threshold as entry barrier. Thus less and less works can be promoted, which is to say there needs to be fitness in this environment for games. The fact I’m at all speaking about Allumeria, is that I see it fit, more than a subgenre of the voxel sandbox world we could dub Minecraft clones. It’s not that, it has fresh air from Terraria in a creative way that reinforces the PvE elements.

There is an active following for Allumeria, and the developer themself communicates online. For instance, posting in the nostalgic subreddit, r/GoldenAgeMinecraft, thereby clearly affiliating the game with the versioning nuances of Minecraft. In the post “Finally overhauled the terrain generator in Allumeria. What do you think?” [7], Unomelon posted screenshots of the new terrain generation.

“I tried multiple times, but the math behind 3D noise (the way you get overhangs and stuff) was really difficult for me to understand. A few days ago, I took another stab at it, it finally clicked in my head.

I quickly set up some abstractions over the top of it so now I can really easily control the shape of the terrain and put together world presets really fast.”

Unomelon, February 23th, 2026. “Finally overhauled the terrain generator in Allumeria. What do you think?”, Reddit.

Indeed, floating islands are one of the oniric things that defined early era Minecraft, alongside the lack of biome diversity. But the channel Unobtainable Melon on *YouTube* does document the game development from before that, with the earliest video dating back to June 3rd, 2025 [8].

[embed]

This video shows that there are trinkets, very much like Terraria, and unlike Minecraft. One more thing I haven’t quite been able to meet yet in-game is the snowy biome or area. And they greatly seem to impact the gameplay, with the ability to climb walls or sprint… All that to say, the game is becoming mature and is probably in one of the phases of its history that are going to experience the most critical changes.

There are quite a few things to say about Allumeria, and I’m now going to be more direct about it, though my playtime is of 6 hours. I really think that the game shows promise and I especially appreciate the openness of the developer, the way they document the game. The game is developed in C# with OpenTK [9], basically bindings to OpenGL, thus ensuring the game a performance that Minecraft has historically lacked, using Java and its garbage collector causing spikes in performances. Although, this criticism does arrive at a time where Mojang is moving towards the newer Vulkan, striving for more dynamic lighting with Vibrant Visuals [10]. But dynamic lighting for previous Minecraft versions is something you need to mod in, like using Modrinth… And here it’s something native, here’s a screenshot from my own gaming experience.

Allumeria Demo 0.14.6 (2026), screenshot by Emilia Lilith-Lolita Hoarfrost, 03/12/2026 — shows dynamic lighting in this C# and OpenTK game project, something differing from Minecraft.

However, the game still has a few issues, which is normal as it’s still in development. For instance, sometimes mobs have a weird pathfinding that doesn’t seem very elaborated. Or sometimes, tree logs will render weirdly as they’re not full blocks and some culling optimization goes on. Also, there are some blocks that are ghosts, you break them and they appear as empty shells for a few seconds before disappearing.

Allumeria Demo 0.14.6 (2026), screenshot by Émilia Lilith-Lolita Hoarfrost, 03/12/2026. — One of the unique new mobs in this sandbox voxel attacking me while I’m doing the Lord’s work, and documenting this glitch!

I very much appreciate the fluid building mechanic though it does require to be familiar with it, but tips seem on by default so eventually players will find it. Otherwise, like Minecraft before it, people may learn about things by watching videos, we are in the streaming era after all. Gaming is a medium for cultural exchanges and people will learn it. People will even be happy to teach others about it. The game already has a Wiki [11], which is not completely up to date... The building process, then permits you to create slabs, panels, stairs or full-on blocks amongst other things. Here’s my house, having terraformed the terrain a bit so that mobs cease to be dangerous by coming from an elevated position… and to plan for urban projects.

Allumeria Demo 0.14.6 (2026), screenshot by Émilia Lilith-Lolita Hoarfrost, 03/12/2026. — The house and the territory, for future urban planning in this world. I like the charm of the default skybox at night and during dusk, it is very poetic. Might lack lens flares like featured in dawnbreaking Terraria, though. Would be… absolutely gorgeous.

Fishing as a mechanic is rather fun for world-building, not only in Minecraft but in Allumeria too. Here, it is more complex because while the part about a hook in the water is still there, you need to reel the fish in using both clicks. There are also baits, a thing you find in Terraria though I have not tried fishing in this game. There is something attractive in having to fight so much for one’s subsistance, and surely some people may try challenges later as a marine if an ocean biome is released or something…

Allumeria Demo 0.14.6 (2026), screenshot by Émilia Lilith-Lolita Hoarfrost, 03/12/2026. — Fishing!

Though Allumeria is a dawning project, there are already four separate repositories on GitHub dedicated to the game. Alludocs, a documention project, presumably for modders in a datamining idea and associated to the Wiki; Chart, a mod providing a minimap to the game; and Allumod, made as a guide to provide intel in how to mod the game. This early adoption mindset that already wishes to make it easier for other developers promises something too — an hint of scalability and the potential for utilities to create a critical threshold from which a modding heyday may emerge, if it becomes something like a new Roblox — , for part of the creativity in sandboxes also comes from the modding community. The fact they are still online might mean the developer is fine with it to a degree, which is always an encouraging thing. Just by looking, I also found the modloader Ignitron. I’m expecting that the modding scene will inspire the game development of Allumeria in the future, but I just hope there won’t come to be too much conflict if it does happen that the main developers take inspiration from such mods. I think part of Better than Wolves for Minecraft did come to inspire some features within the contemporary game, namely cauldrons, but also a way for fire to be activated to power such cauldrons (how dispensers would be now able to use flint and steel items), hoppers…

At first, I intended on doing a genealogy of sandbox voxels, but since Terraria does NOT count as a voxel game, being in 2D, we’re going to go with a sandbox genealogy. Which is going to stretch from Infiniminer (2009) at least! RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999) and Dwarf Fortress (2006) were also earlier inspirations for Minecraft. There will also be a timeline to guide you, but be mindful it is not always the official date of release I use but actually the time I have information for the game beginning its development at… This is my philosophy as a blogger: I want to recognize the merits of the times of foundation of games.

Timeline of Sandbox Games (Émilia Lilith-Lolita Hoarfrost, 03/12/2026), using Mermaid.

A Genealogy of Sandbox Games (Émilia Lilith-Lolita Hoarfrost, 03/12/2026), using Mermaid.

Gaming is a medium where innovation occurs often by discovering new systems, though playing others’ games. Sometimes, originality is valued by game designers, with some even outright refusing to play others’ games. But this just leaves them to reinvent the wheel. I hope this article was a good introduction to the game genre that is sandbox. If you want, you can subscribe to me on here, as I may cover games in the future.

When Allumeria takes its controls from Minecraft (and other things too like how it uses the JSON file format to generate assets from what I’ve gathered, ask how I know, I made a Minecraft mod once!), what is kept is the innovation of game design, the ergonomy of gaming, and transferrable skills such as strafing with arrows, aiming with a mouse… this rewards PC players that have honed such skills while lowering the entry to newcomers that are somewhat familiar with such codes. Since it is something subtle and intuitive, that doesn’t necessarily have you going through several pages of dialogue boxes or a slideshow experience, it counts as elegant game design [12].

To recontextualize, here’s a quick quote of my own:

So with games that have cumulative versioning, simplicity at the first stages of development is lost over time. But there are also editions like Pocket Edition, that has redefined controls. Accessibility settings further complexify the game in my opinion, due to how many options there are. Minecraft in its first years brings to me a fondness perhaps guided by nostalgia, but it seems founded in reason that its simplicity is why. There is something perhaps magic about a barebone voxel engine with more roughness and less polish, closer to coded “in a garage” (to repeat the Game Dev Tycoon stereotype) than AAA studios.

The elegance is found in the simplicity, but there are also subtle tips of controls, kind of what Minecraft later added with the recipe guide and the achievement in the first few seconds telling you to open the inventory, thus telling you there’s one, and then to go chop some wood. It might be small, something not everyone will remark as far as tutorials go, less of a turn-off than later Pokémon tutorial sections… But yours truly had to abandon Minecraft on her first playthrough because I could not chop down a tree for the life of me… I did not know about keeping your left click held down.

You might have noticed something a bit curious with my genealogy of sandbox games, along with the timeline. Factorio and Satisfactory feel widely different in terms of game design compared to the likes of Starbound, Terraria, and thus why mention them as sandboxes? When they could also be counted rather in another type of game, automation? My definition of sandbox now includes engineering, as it is a form of emergent behavior born from rather simple rules, and at their core all sandbox games are systems of rules. I feel like Allumeria might come to include a few engineering elements, since there are circuits after all.

*Allumeria: A sandbox voxel game launching a demo on Steam in early 2026. It got DMCA’d by Tracer AI for Mojang, before the request’s withdrawal. The game seems to show promise and to feature elements found in Terraria (trinkets, trees falling, bait for fishing, structures in the world) and Minecraft *(default controls, mining, crafting in 3D).

Automation: Among sandboxes, automation games are featuring elements that tie several features between themselves with specific modalities for several components. For instance, Minecraft hoppers from dropped items to chests, but also in Satisfactory with the conveyor belts. What is important is that automation 1) happens by itself; 2) features an engineering part of creativity by having to concretely solve issues, sometimes having to adapt like seeking to fit a given area, or to handle such or such size of hitboxes to filter mobs…; 3) may be tied to a progression system, for instance tier-associated components. Minecraft has comparators requiring quartz, thus exploring the Nether dimension. Satisfactory has research trees and tiers. And Allumeria, well it has copper and silver currencies that pay-wall the access to some logic elements, thus a sense of progression in being able to access automation as you progress through the game.

Game design: Maybe you feel like this entry isn’t necessary, but it’s important to clarify the discussion before it occurs. Games are meant to be a ludic experience, an entertainment product. However different people seek various things from gaming… Game design is the theoretical discourse around the production and reception of such cultural products. As such it is situated in contemporary history, or can turn to other game traditions, such as chess and other disciplines such as: anthropology, archaeology, ethnography…

OpenTK: A library in C# that acts as an interface and abstraction for OpenGL, the same way raylib functions for C++. Therefore it is used for things like plotting vertices, and doing matrix calculations. The relatively low level of C++ enables more performance than Minecraft relying on Java for cross-platform compatibility, at the cost of a garbage collector in a virtual runtime environment.

Sandbox: A game genre valuing creativity, engineering, exploration, replayability, crafting elements, building elements, a combination thereof, sometimes also procedural generation… The name refers to a children’s playground.

Voxel: For the uninitiated, a voxel stands for the contraction of two words, a volume and a pixel. This consists in an artstyle found in games like Minecraft with the ladders and campfires clearly showing smaller cubic bits for a texture in volume. Terraria is not voxel, Cubic World (2013) is. Allumeria too.

Infiniminer: A foundational iteration for the genre, it directly inspired Minecraft the same year, in 2009. The block interaction system comes from there, breaking and placing blocks, along finding natural resources in this way to exploit for the sake of goals that reward the act of exploring a procedurally generated world.

[1] By Wes Fenlon. Contributions from Christopher Livingston, last updated 11 February 2026. “Microsoft has revoked the DMCA takedown that forced an indie Minecraft-like off Steam”, PC Gamer. https://www.pcgamer.com/games/survival-crafting/i-genuinely-do-not-know-what-to-do-says-developer-of-minecraft-like-allumeria-after-microsoft-issues-a-dmca-takedown-forcing-it-off-steam/

[2] REDMOND, Wash. September 15, 2014. “Minecraft to join Microsoft”, Company News, Microsoft. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2014/09/15/minecraft-to-join-microsoft/

[3] 2 May 2007–1 March 2026. “Streisand effect”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

[4] u/BoyCubPiglet2, February 11, 2026. “‘I genuinely do not know what to do’ says developer of Minecraft-like Allumeria after Microsoft issues a DMCA takedown, forcing it off Steam”, r/Games, Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1r1imz4/comment/o4qfd14/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

[5] Daniel P. H. Fox, June 13, 2025. “Mojang killed my voxel game.”, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RTFpl0tLGc

[6] u/theaveragegowgamer, February 10, 2026. “Jeb has been made aware of the DMCA strike”, r/PhoenixSC, Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixSC/comments/1r1elqy/jeb_has_been_made_aware_of_the_dmca_strike/

[7] u/unomelon, February 23, 2026. “Finally overhauled the terrain generator in Allumeria. What do you think?”, r/GoldenAgeMinecraft, Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldenAgeMinecraft/comments/1rcq7fi/finally_overhauled_the_terrain_generator_in/

[8] Unomelon, June 3, 2025. “Allumeria 0.6 Trailer”, Unobtainable Melon, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASbetPHpF3M

[9] u/unomelon, January 21, 2025. “My C# + OpenTK Voxel Game”, r/VoxelGameDev, Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/VoxelGameDev/comments/1i6ock7/my_c_opentk_voxel_game/

[10] Staff, February 18, 2026. “Another step towards Vibrant Visuals”, Minecraft.net. https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/another-step-towards-vibrant-visuals-for-java-edition

[11] 3 July 2025. “Allumeria Wiki”, Wiki.gg. https://allumeria.wiki.gg/

[12] Émilia Lilith-Lolita Hoarfrost, September 16, 2025. “Elegance in Game Design”, Medium. https://medium.com/@emiliahoarfrost/elegance-in-game-design-cf9f220d225c

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