Of course, since that was in mid 2018, many of the devs that have joined the project haven't played Cube World, and are inspired by other games or mechanics they enjoy. We list our inspirations as Cube World, BotW, and Dwarf Fortress as our primary ones. As is mentioned in other comments here, Minecraft is also part of this lineage, however, we aren't going down the path of buildable blocks very much.

Since the early days of Veloren, we've defintely worked to break away from "just a clone", into gameplay that is more derivative of what we can achive with our engine, but there is still a lot of work to go before we consider it "released" :)

Are we not going to mention the 900lb gorilla, Minecraft?

That's Cube World. This game looks a lot like Cube World. And not just in the way that Cube World looked like Minecraft in that it was blocks and procedural (which is mostly where Cube World and Minecraft intersected, cw has no block building in the game).

Looking at this game and knowing a little of the saga of Cube World I'd bet Veloren is an Open Source response to Cube World making an appearance, exciting a lot of people with potential, going silent for years, then eventually releasing something less fun than the initial preview and dropping into obscurity. It looks at a glance like this began development during the aforementioned silent period.