Teardown

Teardown turns loose voxel clusters into rigid bodies so nothing floats. When voxels break away from a main cluster, the game instantly converts them into a new rigid body physics object. Furniture is built from hundreds or thousands of tiny blocks, and detached chunks fall, collide and roll like real debris.

This removes the floating platform problem of simple voxel games, at much higher resolution than Minecraft. The source's line: "There are no floating platforms here!"

Teardown drops a building only once it is fully cut from the ground. A huge building can hang on a single strand of voxels and stay up. The source says this kind of rule feels arbitrary compared with a structural stress check.

Bad Company 2 also feels arbitrary to the source, because it collapses a building after a set number of prefab pieces break.

Full destruction is compelling for players but a nightmare for designers. Teardown's designer calls a fully destructible environment compelling for players but a nightmare for design. Game design usually depends on limits, rules and constraints, and full destruction can throw them out.

Noita's maker Nolla gives a similar warning: realistic simulation often does not produce good gameplay. The source's line: "Often, that's not the case".

Red Faction: Guerilla decides collapse with a per-layer stress check. Each brick gets a weight and a strength, and bricks are grouped into layers. A layer holds only if its strength exceeds the weight of all the layers above it, so buildings react to removed foundations.

The source sets this against Teardown's rule of falling only when fully detached from the ground. Its quote: "is the strength of one layer greater than the weight of the all the layers above it?"