Making Minecraft Spherical

on a tangential note I once tried to get pathfinding working on a rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb feeling as regular 3-ish level octtree Dwarf Fortress of 2014-ish vintage was insufficiently weird.

this did not end well, but was hilarious. just to visualise the stuff I had to spend a week gluing cardboard rhombododecahedrons from pizza boxes.

what I learned is that they make much more fun toys than plain old cubes.

and that shallow sparse octtree-like things are in fact better for those kind of games (or GIS for that matter).

Could you just cheat and render part of larger square map (with top wrapped to bottom and left wrapped to right) inside a circle and deform it so it just gives illusion but isn't really a sphere?

Quick experiments in blender show me that you can create a cube, then use subdivision modifier to get a fake sphere like the one in the article. Then put camera close to the surface and give it very low focal length. This way it looks like a sphere but the strange points where 3 quads meet are way out of the view so I basically see just one face of 6 sided sphere.

If I now textured this side so that it displays roughly 50% of the square texture containing the world map and scrolled and rotated the texture as I try to "rotate" the sphere I should pretty much not be able tell it from a real sphere but have a 100% normal 2d square Minecraft grid on top of it.

It looks quite nice, even and natural:

https://postimg.cc/XXNgCYF8

Texturing is a bit weird because polar caps are just two regions of the world with stuff in between them in all directions so you need to put them at the right distance and size them properly so they show up. And even then they disappear as you rotate the world by scrolling in W-E direction. To make them visible at all times, you'd need to make them half of your world. Which might be fine for your game to have vast, icy biome connecting north and south of your planet. Or even two separate zones of the planet separated by northern and southern walls of ice.

https://postimg.cc/34GCKkDj

I'm not sure how well lightning is going to work with such low focal length but it might be fine.

https://postimg.cc/ThGWyN8v

Why can't you cover spherical surface with quads so that 4 lines meet at every vertex? How would the proof of that look?

I like the shader you used for the core.

A torus would have been easier.

Another game that allows building on spherical surfaces is Dyson Sphere Program: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Prog...