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Methodox Voxel Sandbox

Methodox Voxel Sandbox is a Windows-only voxel world generator, editor and renderer. It rolls a world from a seed, lets you edit it in first person from inside — walk up to a wall, break it, build somewhere else — and photographs it with a built-in path tracer that produces photoreal PNG and HDR renders.

The download also includes the Methodox Voxel Scene Viewer, which opens any voxel scene you already have — MagicaVoxel, Goxel, OpenVDB, Minecraft schematics — at any scale, and renders it with the same engine.

Getting started

Download, unzip, and run Methodox Voxel Sandbox.exe. The game opens on a small lit platform while your world generates in the background, then swaps it in — a status banner shows progress. Press H at any time for the in-game control reference.

The same seed always builds the same world. Launch with Methodox Voxel Sandbox.exe --seed 42 (or any number) to revisit one you liked; with no arguments you get the default world.

Worlds

A seed does not adjust settings — it rolls a place. One of nine landforms:

Landform What it is
Highlands Broad valleys under ridge lines, forested. The most habitable.
Archipelago Drowned peaks: islands, lagoons, sea stacks undercut by the water.
Canyonlands Terraced plateaux split by deep, sheer-walled gorges.
Karst Towers Limestone towers and natural arches over a flooded floor.
Rainforest Warm and overgrown: buttressed giants and layered canopy.
Volcanic Reach Black rock, lava fields, ash slopes and vents.
Frostspires High and frozen: glaciers, ice shelves, wind-carved spires.
Painted Mesa Banded desert rock in flat-topped buttes and hoodoos.
Skylands A broken world: land hanging in the air over what is left of the ground.

On top of that, any of seven things may have befallen it — drowned, parched, overgrown, frozen, smouldering, shattered, or riddled with crystal caverns — each of which rewrites the landform rather than decorating it. The world announces what it turned out to be when it finishes generating.

The surface is a three-dimensional density field rather than a height map, so terrain folds back over itself into arches, undercuts and floating islands; rock strata band across cliff faces; soil and snow sit only where a slope can hold them. A default world is 384×384×192 and generates in under a second.

Controls

Keys What they do
W A S D + mouse Walk and look
Shift / Ctrl / Space Sprint / crouch / jump, swim up, rise
F11 Fly (Ctrl+F11 flies through everything)
Left / right mouse Break / build (each brush names its own two actions)
1–9, wheel Pick a tray slot; wheel resizes the brush, Shift+wheel cycles the tray
F1–F6 Brushes: cell, box, sphere, terrain, smooth, paint
Ctrl+Z / Y Undo / redo, per stroke
Ctrl+S / L / E / I Save / load / export / import
B / O / H Block palette, settings, help
P Photo Mode (below)
F7–F10 Hide the display, cycle render quality, pause time, skip an hour
Escape Back out of whatever is open, then quit

Removing water: the crosshair normally aims through water so you can build through a lake surface. To remove water, put water in your hand first — the crosshair then targets water itself, and break takes it away.

Photo Mode

Press P and the world holds still — the clock, the water, the clouds, all of it — while the renderer switches from the realtime view to a progressive path tracer. The picture refines in front of you like a developing photograph: light actually bounces, glass refracts, metals reflect, clouds glow from within, and shadows soften with distance. Leave it running as long as you like; the sample counter in the status bar tells you how far it has refined.

The Photo panel stays usable the whole time:

  • Lens — aperture and focus distance for true depth of field, with a Pick focus target button: press it, then click anything in the picture and the focal plane moves there.
  • Light — the hour of day, the sun's apparent size (bigger sun, softer shadows), and four style dials: Sun strength, Sky light, Bounce light and Water glow. The defaults give the classic crisp voxel-render look; pushing everything to 1 gives bare, uncompromised physics.
  • Quality — samples per frame, light bounces, resolution, and a firefly limit for noisy scenes. * Image — exposure, bloom and vignette apply live to the refining image without restarting it.

Save image writes either a finished PNG or a Radiance .hdr — the raw measured light before exposure and tone mapping, which any professional imaging tool (Photoshop, Blender, darktable) can re-expose and grade. Renders land in a Renders folder beside your saved worlds.

Changing anything that alters the light itself (the hour, the lens, the dials) restarts the photograph automatically; display settings never do. P or Escape returns to play exactly where you left off.

Materials

The 255-slot palette is organised by category in the block browser (B): terrain, vegetation, ores, building materials, glass and metal, lights, and a full colour ramp. Materials carry real physical properties — metals are conductors, glass and crystals refract with true indices of refraction, water flows light through itself, emissive blocks genuinely light their surroundings — and both the realtime view and Photo Mode read them. The browser shows what the block in your hand is made of.

Files and formats

Worlds save in the native .dvx format, which round-trips everything. For trading with other tools:

Format Extension Notes
Native .dvx Full fidelity, plus your position and time of day
MagicaVoxel .vox Import and export
Goxel .gox, .txt Import and export
MagicaVoxel raw .xraw Import and export
OpenVDB .vdb Import and export
Minecraft schematic .schematic, .schem Import and export

Saves live under your user application data (Divooka/VoxelSandbox/Worlds), so they survive reinstalls; photo renders go to Divooka/VoxelSandbox/Renders.

Command line

Useful switches for launching:

--seed <n>              World seed; the same seed always builds the same world.
--size <n | x,y,z>      World size in cells. Default 384,384,192.
--classic-terrain       The older height-mapped generator, for comparison.
--no-clouds --no-trees  Leave the sky or the ground bare.
--photo [samples]       Headless: render a photo capture and exit (see --help for the full set).
--help                  Everything else.