Trove is an apt name for the experience that developer Trion Worlds delivers. The best thing about cornerstones is that you can move them around to each new randomly generated world you visit as needed, adding both convenience and a way to show off your skills (or patience). Others seem to represent Mega Man levels, as they require a seemingly endless succession of timed leaps to reach the player's health potion refill station or other service boxes. My favorite cornerstone was a re-creation of Sauron's tower of Barad-dГ»r, which shot so far into the sky that I marveled as much at the player's ability not to fall while building it as at the design. Other players have made better work with the limitations, though, usually by going up. One downside is that plots for the single-player homes aren't particularly large I was barely able to get a rudimentary re-creation of the Alamo up on mine. Taking the whirlwind tour of a dragon's lair.

Most of the time, that crafting occurs on player homes on player plots (called 'cornerstones') or in a special zone for 'clubs' (i.e., Trove's version of guilds), where groups of players can build their own world one voxel at a time. Deserts give way to motherboardy landscapes straight out of Tron, tundra gives way to open seas where you can fish or steer a ship, and as with Minecraft, almost every bit of it can be harvested and used for crafting. Yet these elements also allow Trove to differentiate itself from almost every other massively multiplayer game by making all zones randomly generated, and each can be accessed from level-appropriate portals in the hub world. Even the most cursory glance at Trove's voxel-heavy landscapes and characters is enough to determine that it owes some heavy debts to Minecraft, and as with Minecraft, exploration and crafting lie at the heart of the experience. I probably would have added a guest bedroom in there, but once again, Trove's queues kept me from playing.

You'll find the entrance just inside the main door to the left, and I've decorated it with the heads of the robots, dragons, and evil knights I've stumbled across on my travels throughout Trove's voxelated vistas. Not the real Alamo in San Antonio, of course, but the one I built in a cleft between two green hills while mosquitoes the size of Paul Reubens pestered me. Thanks to my efforts, there's now a basement in the Alamo.

Trove video game saloon boss