Terasology for young children? how old?

[Smurk]

Hello everyone

My kids have been bothering me for too long about Minecraft, I eventually agreed to look into it and eventually decided for Terasology. But, is the game really suitable for young children? in the basic game, are there monsters roaming around? do they have to fight? can they play offline with no interaction whatsoever with weird people?

I guess, you could answer me that I should just try the game. But I know I won't have time to try it as much as they will try it. You know children, the minute I will leave them in front on the game, they will unlock a zombie-apocalypse-mode noone has ever found before. (if you ever tried to child-proof your house, don't bother, it's useless!)

Thanks everyone!

 

[Cervator]

Hi @Smurk and welcome

We've talked about the educational aspect of the game and having children play it on occasion. There isn't really anything blocking it right now - offline and local multiplayer play works pretty well, no weirdos or surprising content. In particular as, well, there isn't a whole lot of content in the first place

They can safely play and build to their heart's content with the basic blocks and maybe a few simple asset modules + the BlockPicker enabled (think creative inventory). But in the game's current state it is really more ideal for modders to start digging in to test and expand content. It isn't very hard to provoke bugs or crashes if you put a bit of effort (or a kid or two) in.

There are a few creatures but none around by default. You have to either manually spawn them (lots of console options, pretty much required for a good chunk of the current content) or place certain blocks to trigger them. And at that point the clock is probably ticking on something eventually crashing

So in short: Currently possible but probably not ideal. We're getting there though!

 

[Cervator]

Oh, I should've linked to this video from @Josharias to showcase some of the interesting content we do have, but I ran across that thread later than this one

 

[Smurk]

Hello. I am sorry I never thank you for your answers, Cervator. Indeed I noticed that it is not hard to crash the game, but that's OK. Now that I know how to crash it, I can easily avoid it. My kids enjoy the game, although they don't play it very often (not that I don't like the game, I just don't allow them to play video games very often). They have fun, and I like how it looks: it's, hmm,"roots" and I like that. My son especially enjoys blowing as many bombs as possible, and then ask me to try and climb back to the surface. My daughter builds stairs and flower gardens. Can't do more cliche.

 

[Cervator]

Wow that sounds pretty nice and sweet! Yeah that shouldn't stress the current state of the game too much

We do need to improve the explosives a bit more sometime, so you can throw or remotely detonate stuff

There are some more plants in the Crops modules, also a few in MoreLights I think (couple glowing plants - been a while since I checked)

Signalling has some basic redstone-like circuitry, including switches and a lamp. You have to get most the blocks from the console though.