Making Minecraft Spherical

You should definitely have a look at space engineers. They have a similar spherical problem with their voxels and I don’t think they went half as far as you did when implementing “orbital bodies”.

As someone who is rather keen on space, gfx, and the algorithms that render them. Kudos. The problems were known to me, which is why I didn’t attempt it, however - the distortion correction, the chunking, I’m thinking if you just limit how far down you can dig (half way to the “core”) it will be fine. You won’t run into those tiny squished blocks that make up the core.

It’s also important to call out the quad-sphere. This is what makes it doable. Naive devs may just map lat long to sin cos spherical coordinates and call it a day, not realizing that their poles are jacked up. The cartography problem. I’m really glad to see that called out as people don’t realize WGS84 sucks for mapping a sphere.

Not allowing excavation to the core solves weird gravity issue as well. Astroneer had super weird gravity at their planet core. You can get stuck oscillating there.

If you really wanted to go for realism, there would be NO GRAVITY at the core. :P

As you dig down you would get lighter and lighter on your feet.

Any mass you are below (within the sphere of Earth) will exert a gravitational pull in one direction, while the mass above you (also within the Earth) will exert an equal and opposite pull.