I might have never been a boy scout, but I've tried making fire from sticks before. It took 2 hours and almost immediately went out. I also have never taken an Econ class, but I love the interplay in board game economies and gameplay loops regarding a scarcity of necessary ingredients for survival. Often times, I'll try developing a similar survival loop in test board/card games. However, here I want to theorize a little bit about what this could look like inside one of my favorite games, Minecraft. Keep in mind though, I'm not even close to a programmer and this is just a bit of daydreaming.

Survival

If all I want is to make Minecraft more difficult (essentially tackling the "creating fire" issue), I'd end up with a game like Vintage Story (assuming all the monsters that make it less-than-realistic are turned off in the settings). I do like the concept of this game since I played a bit of TerrafirmaCraft in the past, though I do think the complexity might hinder it a bit.

Economy

So what about economy? It might necessitate ditching a single player experience entirely to reinforce that working together is necessary, similar to Eco Global Survival or Minecraft mod Dwarves vs Zombies, though the scope of these are much smaller than a minecraft-style sandbox adventure. To have a single player experience, NPC programming will have to be better than anything I've seen before.

Goals

Before explaining what I think Minecraft might look like if it were to implement a more social economy, I should first go over my goals.

• Fun Gameplay loop so people actually want to play it
• Respect players' time and don't purposefully extend tasks to prevent post-scarcity
• Skill and advancement trees for individuals as well as "society"
• Cooperation is a major tenant and it should be exceedingly difficult (though not impossible) to act in antisocial ways

What simplifying and combining these in Minecraft might look like

Starting up a minecraft server brings you to a setup screen like Stellaris, Rimworld, or even Vintage Story. You get to choose your server size, which will determine how many resources there will be in the world as well as a randomized, but customizable skill spread (and maybe even character drawbacks like allergies, phobias, and predispositions). Then you have to decide whether you want to have catastrophic events like meteors and how often those occur. But after that, you're in the game.

Instead of default minecraft where you spawn all alone in the woods, having to punch trees to progress, it will spawn you near another player and it is your combined goal to create fire, find moving water, and collect/hunt for food. Creating a solid shelter in a single day like minecraft is unrealistic. So you divvy up the tasks between the group. You find a cave or throw together some branches and palm fronds to construct a makeshift shelter and hope a predator doesn't come by at night. Other people on the server should be in the same situation, scattered throughout the world.

The next day, you'll find the campfire is out and you have to find more food and start construction on a better shelter. Maybe you meet other players along the way, which makes tasks easier to accomplish. The goal now is to create a rudimentary hut, preferably off the ground for safety, but on the ground if necessary. You collect reed or bamboo as well as stone (which takes up significantly more of your inventory similar to how inventory works in Subnautica) and hand it off to your group who will either process or move it into place. An entire house shouldn't be able to fit in your pocket.

After a couple days of hunting/gathering and constructing, you've made a few small rudimentary houses on a raised platform. Good thing too, because, since you've been drinking out of the stream, one of the people in your party has gotten sick and has to sleep or work at at a greatly reduced speed (more on this later). This will cause a tech tree upgrade to be visible, which is water purification, first through filtering, and second through boiling. You've been tasked with finding clay though, so you can pack it around the walls of your hut to make it more comfortable. Another person is tending a farm. Another person might be creating a net for easier fishing.

Fast forward and you start to see brick houses and little communities pop up where they can start to decide, democratically or not, how and in what direction to run their little community. Will hierarchies form? Will people be kicked out for not being "useful enough"? Will a form of currency be created instead of bartering everything? That's entirely up to the community.

I'll write more on this later, especially about the fact that being specialized as a farmer the whole time doesn't respect a player's time and it is probably not fun either, so I'm debating about letting players decide which existing character they want to control when they log onto the server another day. This means that if your character got sick and has to sleep (or even dies), you don't have to stop playing- you just control other characters or be reborn as a new character with reduced skill points.