Trove is an experiment born of adventure and allowing the community to craft a game from the ground up. A completely transparent development cycle where the developers constantly interact with the community and actually take feedback seriously is one of the founding principles of the game. From my very first talk with Trion, they have been nothing but serious about interacting with the community and letting them decide the direction of the game.

I recently had a chance to sit down and talk with Trion about Trove and their latest community interaction intuitive - allowing the community to help build the next biome.

The process is rather simple, there is a post on the Trove Reddit where fans of Trove can post their ideas. The developers are going to take the best ideas and allow the community to vote on which one they're going to develop. Of course, there are some limitations, such as the fact they can't build a Dragonball Z biome due to copyright issues nor can they make a complete virtual reality biome due to technical issues.

The neat thing about this is that the game just isn't built by a single team who get to lord over all of the game's mechanics, developing everything themselves. It's actually a cooperative effort with the community, which is critical in a game like Trove where there is so many ways to make a voxel based game, but only so many of those are what the community that's going to play and invest in it want.

So, if you're interested in Trove and you want a chance to make an impact on the game development cycle yourself, then go and post your ideas on Reddit. You don't even have to play the game, really, to submit your idea, but of course I suggest everyone give Trove a try. It's a 150mb download and you get your own personal homeworld to do whatever you want with, which is awesome.

Up next will be the new character class, which the community will work alongside developers to design as well. Both of these are bonus milestone unlocks from the Trove crowdfunding campaign. If the campaign does well enough, there will reach a point where the community will work alongside the developers to build an endgame dungeon instance.

I did ask if this would be the only time the community could work with the developers to build a biome and the good news is that it could be a regular thing. If the process isn't stressing or resource intensive, it could be something that they do again. So fans of Trove should know to keep a look out for the developers to call out for idea submissions in the future.

One thing to note is that Trove is still in alpha, from my understanding, and as development continues it will progress more and more. There will probably reach a point where the community can build various items and features and upload them directly into the game. There is no confirmation on this process happening or a timeline, but it is definitely something they're considering.

One interesting tidbit, I did ask if they're considering ever taking the game in a direction of Player Studio, where there is monetization of uploaded content. Their answer is like most things with Trove, if it's something the community wants they'll figure out a way to make it happen, but the game is all about the community, so it has to be really something they really want for them to go that direction.

Well that's all I wanted to say about Trove's build a biome with the developers thing going on. If you're interested in Trove, be sure to visit their official site.