[Macha]

Its literally three words after the excerpted section, but I agree that Cube World is a more direct inspiration. Certainly Minecraft popularised combining voxel games with open worlds, but I think gameplay wise Cube World definitely belongs first on the list. After all, Minecraft didn't introduce the concept of voxel terrain though, infiniminer and worms 3d being earlier examples of games using it

[nonbirithm]

Having been a part of that era, I can attest that to a certain tribe of young and aspiring programmers, attempting to implement clones of Minecraft and talking endlessly about "procedural generation" and "voxels" and "chunks" was all the rage back in 2012.

[zesterer]

I was one of them, as my YouTube channel can attest. The desire to create procedural worlds never left though.