A solo dev has been building this gorgeous voxel game for four years, and it finally has a release date

Minecraft has long felt like an unmovable pillar of the genre – anything trying to copy its blocky look, sense of adventure, and open-ended creativity is almost doomed to fall short by comparison. That theory is getting harder to defend, though. Hytale has been looming on the horizon for years, and a wave of smaller voxel games keeps growing alongside it. One of the more promising ones is Lay of the Land, which just locked in a release date.

The first thing you notice about Lay of the Land is how good it looks. The blocks have a sharpness and color to them that feels just right, and the landscapes come across as carefully crafted rather than algorithmically generated.

That's a bit of an illusion – most of it is procedural, driven by terrain tech that produces convincing hills, rivers, and winding paths.

Building is, naturally, a big part of the experience. Creative Mode lets you go wild with no restrictions, while the survival side has you harvesting materials from the world around you. The construction tools go well beyond basic blocks: there's support for terrain sculpting, cylindrical rooms, and sloped or cone-shaped roofs.

Crafting works without menus too – instead of navigating UI screens, you physically place the required ingredients together and perform an action to produce the item.

The magic-based combat looks like a solid complement to all that building. Levitation lets you pick up nearby objects and hurl them at enemies, and collapsing a cave ceiling onto a group of opponents is very much on the table. There's clear potential for emergent, unexpected moments that make each encounter feel different.

What makes all of this more remarkable is that Lay of the Land is the work of one person. Developer Tooley1998, listed as Southern Cross Interactive on the Steam page, has been posting progress videos publicly since September 2021. After several years of solo work, a launch date is now confirmed.

Lay of the Land arrives on Steam on April 8. No price has been announced yet, but you can add it to your wishlist now.

Hytale remains the biggest threat to Minecraft's dominance, but smaller projects like Lay of the Land and Allumeria are quietly making the voxel genre a lot more interesting to follow.