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So first off, nothing is truly finalized yet. Mojang is not some big EA game maker that had a deadline and forces it to happen regardless of how ready the game is or isn't. Instead, according to the interview they have two developers working on 0x10c right now and it sounds like Notch and company are still playing around with a lot of cool ideas. The pricing and revenue streams aren't even cemented yet!

So from the story part of the page you said you skimmed there were sleep chambers that screwed up little endian with big endian and put everyone to sleep for 1 0000 0000 0000 years and now it's 281 474 976 712 644 AD and the first people are starting to wake up. You've got an extremely sparse universe with black holes and lots of empty space.

Now according to the interview the first release will consist only of "you can build a ship and you can play with the computer components in it." And you can design the ship, lay it out more efficiently, etc. However, "Each ship has a generator capable of producing a fixed wattage, and everything you connect to it drains wattage. A cloaking field, for example, might require almost all the power from the generator, forcing you to turn off all computers and dim all lights in order to successfully cloak. The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish." So you're going to have to manage your resources and Notch mentions Faster Than Light (a game I kickstarted and enjoyed).

He also alludes to the possibility of your ship flying around and searching for things, a 3D printer, planetary exploration and that kind of stuff. They're not too clear on how multiplayer will work but it sounds like it's going to mostly be a crew on the same ship. Notch talks about 'launching all nukes at space stations' when he's leading and so it sounds like you'll interact with things outside your ship (probably through your DCPU-16).

It sounds like a lot of these ideas are half baked like the 3D printer that he described:

The idea is that, with things like turrets, you have a 3D printer to build the shell, like a computer case shell, but you still have to put components in there. Players in the game aren’t really engineers – they’re more like pilots, so they can’t build those parts. You have to scavenge for those parts, and find abandoned ships and try to find a working CPU or something. And those could have slightly different attributes: you might find a CPU running at 105% and try to trade that. But you can also mine for basic resources, like if you want a gold computer case – we’ll see if we actually have different materials, but that’s what I want – you have to mine for gold and put it in the 3D printer.

But I'm really excited for this game, even if it is just a Faster Than Light type game where you build a spaceship and outfit it and attack or aid outside ships. You would fight intruders that beam into your ship or repair holes left by attacks/asteroids. You know there's a lot that could still be added or modified in this game and anything with this setting and emulation embedded really excites me.

http://0x10c.com/

Not yet released, but looks quite cool.

Learn to program from a guy who puts 1 cycle Division instructions in imaginary CPUs. What could possibly go wrong? :)

From the linked CPU specs

DCPU-16 Specification
Copyright 2012 Mojang
Version 1.1 (Check 0x10c.com for updated versions)

* 16 bit unsigned words
* 0x10000 words of ram
* 8 registers (A, B, C, X, Y, Z, I, J)
* program counter (PC)
* stack pointer (SP)
* overflow (O)

0x10000 16 bit words is not 512 bits. I think they'll find a compiler quite useful.