
Building Infiniminer requires Visual Studio 2008 and XNA Game Studio 3.0. In 2015, the Google cloud server for the game was shut down, but the game is still available for download, and the source code of Infiniminer is now available under the MIT License. Soon, there were players using modified clients to cheat on servers, and multiple communities arose each with different versions of the game, and it was hard for the developers to maintain Infiniminer, resulting in further development ceasing. Zachtronics discontinued the development of the game less than a month after its first release after a major source leak was discovered which allowed hackers to make unauthorized modifications to the game. However, as the game gained popularity, players decided it was much more fun to build things than to compete for points. It was originally intended to be played as a team-based competitive game, where the goal is to locate and excavate precious materials and bring your findings to the surface to earn points for your team until the winning team reaches a certain amount of points. The sky is perpetually dark, and the landscape of the limited-size maps is made up entirely of bare dirt, stone, ores, and non-flowing lava blocks. Most building blocks are team-colored and serve a specific function, and player models and tools are flat sprites instead of 3-dimensional objects. The game features two teams made up of up to four classes, with each having their own set of abilities, tools, and blocks they can build with, each costing a certain amount of metal ore to place. Like Minecraft, Infiniminer is a block-based digging and building game.

It quickly garnered a following on message boards around the internet and inspired Notch to start working on Minecraft several weeks after it was discontinued. It was developed by Zach Barth of Zachtronics Industries with the help of a friend in their spare time, and released in steps of incremental updates during April and May of 2009.

Infiniminer is commonly associated with Minecraft for giving Notch the idea for where to go with Minecraft, sometimes as a direct forerunner. Infiniminer is an open-source multi-player block-based sandbox building and digging game, in which the player plays as a miner searching for minerals by carving tunnels through procedurally generated voxel-based maps and building structures.


INFINIMINER IS DISCONTINUED AND NO LONGER AVAILABLE. Sound familiar? That’s because Infiniminer is the game that started the “block genre” that everyone knows and loves! It’s also quite buggy and old and is listed here purely for historical reasons. Infiniminer is a first-person competitive mining game that takes place in a procedurally generated block world allowing players to mine, build, and explore.
