My first steps in Bitcraft: Age of Automata, Clockwork Labs’ upcoming survival crafting MMO, felt a bit like Minecraft, if I’m honest. There was a need to explore my surroundings, grab materials and start to build tools to shape the world around me. Bitcraft aims to blend the hundreds of hours of content that survival crafting MMOs can offer nowadays with the scale, social interactions, and scope of an actual MMORPG. Bitcraft presents players with a fully persistent, editable world and tells them to “go build,” morphing its colorful world to their liking.
Drawing inspiration from renowned MMOs like RuneScape, Albion Online, and EVE Online, Clockwork Labs’ co-founder Tyler Cloutier envisions a world in Bitcraft where players unite, construct communities, and eventually establish empires. In this world, their achievements are not just personal but also leave a mark on the in-game world map, a testament to their collective efforts.
While the market has been flooded with survival-crafting MMOs in recent years, many of them seem to be riding the MMO wave without genuinely embodying the genre's essence. In a recent conversation at GDC, Cloutier assured me that Bitcraft is a departure from this trend. It embraces a more traditional,' old school' approach to MMO gameplay, setting it apart from its contemporaries.
“What makes an MMORPG for us is not that there are other players in the game, which some of the genre has become. What it means for us is that you have meaningful interactions with hundreds or thousands of players.”
This could come from simply buying an item from a crafter, such as an axe, which may have had multiple other crafters involved in creating the materials needed to craft the final axe that a merchant just sold. Or it could come from helping to terraform the world around you with friends and other players to establish a new trading outpost in friendly territory.
We’ve entered an era of MMORPGs where the “Multiplayer” part of the genre feels optional, yet with Bitcraft, it feels like every system is designed to depend on the social links you build with other players. In that respect, it feels very much like the MMOs that inspired it.
Hearing Cloutier describe end-game situations where player-formed Empires could vie for trade routes, access to resources, and more pulled me back into the struggles for space in EVE Online, while hearing how building up lifeskilling and incorporating other player’s expertise to craft reminded me of my Law Rune running days in RuneScape.
Moving my character felt like I was stepping back in time to RuneScape, as you move with a simple mouse click rather than WASD - which is reserved for your camera. I never quite got used to it during my session, but I can imagine with time it’ll come. The right click is used to interact with objects, while middle-mouse is an alternative for camera movement, feeling right out of the old school MMO design book.
Sure, WASD movement might feel better in theory, but a mouse click makes sense with the slightly isometric presentation. Games like Diablo 4 show that it can still work on PC even in 2024, so Clockwork Labs is in good company here.
Staking Your Claim
Like many survival MMOs nowadays, such as Mainframe’s upcoming Pax Dei, players will plop down a claim to ensure your structures and hard-earned resources aren’t gobbled up by griefers that inevitably populate every online community. This claim system can be opened up to allow new players to join in and contribute to the building, such as putting a call out for a merchant to set up a shop or maybe a builder to help bring a project to its close.
The structures you build first appear as blueprints in the world, much like we see in Nightingale, and allow collaborative building to speed things along.This type of collaborative building effort doesn’t matter much in the early game, but those larger town and Empire-level projects show the strength of the collaborative process.
As players progress through Bitcraft, Cloutier described a situation where groups can designate a “central planner” of sorts who lays out the buildings as they envision, with the rest of the members contributing resources and actually building the structures themselves to bring the idea to fruition.
The earliest moments I had in Bitcraft: Age of Automata were spent gathering resources such as sticks, rocks and more, building basic tools and a workbench to craft more advanced kit, and even plop down a basic shelter to act as a bed. Standard stuff. Eventually, we moved on to claiming my own land to build more advanced structures and collaborate with others.
Claiming a plot is as simple as placing a totem on a piece of land that hasn’t yet been claimed, though some work has to be put into the claim to keep it around for a while. Early on, you’ll be able to upgrade your claim to keep it around a bit longer, but as you decide to expand, there will be more of a burden on keeping the claim going. Upgrading a claim doesn’t just expand its reach, but also increases the number of other players you can recruit to work on your claim with you, further strengthening those social bonds Bitcraft is centered on.
As Bitcraft players progress further and claims get larger and start to form towns, players will need a place to store their resources, items and much more, right? Well, towns can build houses and living structures to then rent to players in the claim.
Yes, you can rent property in this MMO.
Renting allows for players to be part of a community without the upkeep of their own claim. Rates are set by the landlords of a specific town doing the renting, and once rented these buildings are only accessible by the one renting it, giving some security to the renter.
Personally, the last thing I want to do is rent a living space from a town for a bit, only to see that the landlord is a griefer and siphoning off my hard-earned resources from my rental property.
This is not just a way to ensure players without a claim have a secure place to store their gear and resources but also a way for towns and empires to build some passive income to then reinvest into their territory. Outright buying in-game property in one of these claims brings its own unique set of problems, including what happens when someone leaves the game and never returns - it's a single-shard game, after all.
Terraforming is also an option for builders and creators in Bitcraft, and, like everything, it costs resources to tackle. While initially, it’s not that hard to raise or lower a hexagonal plot of land, costing few supplies to do so, the more you terraform from its initial state, the more expensive it’s going to be. This means that alone you won’t make much progress right away, unlike the expansive changes you make in, say, Minecraft right away, and it’s another activity where players can band together to rapidly shape the world around them.
“So the further away from the natural state of the terrain you get, the more cost in terms of labor basically put into there,” Cloutier says. “So that’s one way we sort of keep things relatively natural. But, if you have a lot of people working together, they can make some very drastic changes to the terrain.”
Establishing Trade
One area that sounded right out of Albion or EVE was the idea of players establishing trade routes with each others’ settlements, helping to bring resources from far flung corners of Bitcraft’s massive map to players where they need them. Market stalls can be set up in towns for any Bitcraft player to buy and sell at, regardless of whether they are part of the claim, helping to give a reason to travel beyond your own borders.
Since resources are scattered across Age of Automata’s world, this will eventually be necessary to build end-game level structures and tools. Cloutier envisions a world where these trading posts and markets are set up organically, established as players terraform the world and discover the best routes throughout the landscape.
This also means that Empires could compete for these trading posts and even have a vested interest in disrupting the supply lines of a rival Empire to diminish their power in a region. Interestingly, there isn’t any PvP combat in Bitcraft, with Cloutier describing these struggles as more of a “group competition” than anything.
“Empires is not really PvP, it’s sort of like a group competition, right?” Cloutier explained to me during our preview at GDC. “So the way I can compete with another Empire is I can put a sort of attack, but it’s like an anti-claim on their claim for their territory, and then they have some time to respond. But it’s really just economic warfare, where I’m providing more supplies to ours than the other. We’re not fundamentally opposed to PvP, but we want to do it in the right way, at the right time, if we decide to.”
Bitcraft’s Game Director Carter Minshull chimed in to add that one of the things they are trying to avoid is turning their survival MMO into a full loot PvP game as a result of introducing full-scale PvP as we see in other survival games, such as Rust or ARK: Survival Ascended. The team is trying to keep it focused less on the PvP, though they aren’t ruling it out in the future.
Looking Ahead
There still seems to be quite a bit to tackle with Bitcraft: Age of Automata ahead of its launch. While it’s billed as a survival crafting MMORPG, I’m not seeing too much survival in the mix right now, but considering the MMO is still in alpha, those features will likely be taking shape as development continues.
Food mechanics are alive and well in Bitcraft right now (for example, I consumed a bit of food to regain stamina so I could continue to explore the world during my demo), and while combat is planned for Bitcraft, it’s not a feature highlighted in the upcoming closed alpha test.
Clockwork Labs’ upcoming MMO sounds ambitious in scope, and the team is certainly passionate about bringing their vision to life. Hearing them talk about upcoming empire struggles, getting players together and playing socially, and even spending a little time talking to Cloutier about our escapades in other MMOs (namely The Lord of the Rings Online), it’s clear the team members are passionate about the genre and what it truly represents. Personally, I can’t wait to learn more as development continues: this is the type of MMO I can find myself sinking hours into - especially with a group of friends to help build and form connections with.
Bitcraft: Age of Automata enters its closed alpha test on April 2nd.
