Notch's Minecraft follow-up is called 0x10c

Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson seems to have decided on a name for his mysterious new sandbox space trading game - it will be called 0x10c.

The Mojang boss Tweeted earlier today that he had registered the title's domain name and cleared it with lawyers.

"The real name has the 'c' raised above the other letters. I won't tell you how to pronounce it yet. It's a riddle," added a further post.

A website has since gone live, explaining that game is "still very early in development" before offering a "list of things we hope to include":

• Hard science fiction
• Lots of engineering
• Fully working computer system
• Space battles against the AI or other players
• Abandoned ships full of loot
• Duct tape!
• Seamlessly landing on planets
• Advanced economy system
• Random encounters
• Mining, trading, and looting
• Single and multi player connected via the multiverse

The site offers up a little plot detail too. It's predictably unparaphrasable so here's the text in full:

"In a parallel universe where the space race never ended, space travel was gaining popularity amongst corporations and rich individuals.

"In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years.

"It's now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy."

As with Minecraft, Notch expects to launch a version early on in development "and let the players help me shape the game as it grows".

"The cost of the game is still undecided, but it's likely there will be a monthly fee for joining the Multiverse as we are going to emulate all computers and physics even when players aren't logged in," he added.

According to an interview with Notch last month, the game will draw inspiration from genre classic Elite and cult sci-fi series Firefly.