There's a benefit to direct manipulation of pixels/voxels within the game. Imagine, if you would: build a 64x64 "flat" foundation of stone. Clicky-clicky-poke

There's a benefit to direct manipulation of pixels/voxels within the game. Imagine, if you would: build a 64x64 "flat" foundation of stone. Clicky-clicky-pokey-pokey to place/remove colored blocks. Post something somewhere to someone: "Hey, I have some fresh voxels for someone to do something with!" => scrape-world.php => asset.vxl => etc... Basically, games with a built-in level-editor tend to be easier to contribute to. Minimally: the potential "editors" are already familiar with 90% of controls, viewpoints, and can see the asset "in-game" already (and they're probably already "in the game / editor" already, no context-switching to blender or autocad or something). I'm 1000% sure that if minecraft added some sort of symmetry + polygon + joint/bone/connection-point tooling, you'd see an explosion of polygon assets available within the community. The technical reason that voxel games are "easier to build" is that you can easily make a 1000x1000x1000 array of integers/chars, and get a 50-"voxel" radius from somewhere and start rendering it with raycasting. Can you render a square? Can you render 100 squares? Boom => voxel engine. Can you get/set a 3d-pixel (voxel)? Can you click "destroy/create" on a raycast target? Boom => voxel editor.