Infiniminer

Infiniminer is an open source multiplayer block-based sandbox building and digging game, inspired by the games Infinifrag, Team Fortress 2, and Motherload, in which the player plays as a miner searching for minerals by carving tunnels through procedurally generated block-based maps and building structures.

History
Infiniminer is commonly associated with Minecraft for giving Notch the idea for where to go with Minecraft, and is often regarded as a direct forerunner. It was developed by Zach Barth of Zachtronics Industries with the help of his friend Chris Gengler in their spare time, and released in steps of incremental updates during April and May of 2009. 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.

Like Minecraft, Infiniminer is a block-based mining and construction game. Players can play on one of two teams, Red or Blue, as one of four classes: Miner, Prospector, Engineer, or Sapper. Each class has their own set of abilities, tools, and blocks they can build with, with each costing a certain amount of metal ore to place. Most building blocks are team-colored and serve a specific function rather than being purely decorative, and playermodels and tools are flat sprites instead of three-dimensional objects. The sky is perpetually dark, and the landscape is made up entirely of bare dirt, stone, ores, and lava blocks which flow similarly to liquids in Minecraft classic. The maps are limited in size, and walking off the edge or digging through the bottom causes the player to fall into the void and die. It was originally intended to be played as a team-based competitive game, where the goal is to locate and excavate precious materials such gold and diamonds, and bring your findings to the surface to earn points for your team, until the winning team reaches a certain amount of points. However, as the game gained popularity, many players decided it was much more fun to build things than to compete for points.

Zachtronics discontinued 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. 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 and the game becoming open source. 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. Building Infiniminer requires Visual Studio 2008 and XNA Game Studio 3.0.

According to Notch, Infiniminer was "the game I wanted to do". Notch enjoyed the game, but found it flawed, noting that while building was fun, there wasn’t enough variation, and he thought that the big red and blue team-colored blocks were "pretty horrible". He believed that a fantasy game in that style "would work really really well", so he created a simple first-person engine in the Infimininer style, reusing some art and code from multiple earlier projects, to create the cave game tech test, which would eventually go on to become Minecraft.

Classes

 * Miner
 * Can build: solid, team force field, ladder
 * Can carry extra loot and can dig twice as fast
 * Prospector
 * Can build: solid, team force field, ladder, beacon
 * Can use the prospectron tool to detect gold and diamond ore and place "dig here!" signs on dirt
 * Engineer
 * Can build: solid, both team force fields, road, ladder, jump, shock, bank, beacon
 * Can carry extra ore and can use the deconstructor tool to instantly break any block they can place
 * Sapper
 * Can build: solid, team force field, ladder, explosive
 * Can use the detonator tool to activate their placed explosives

Natural

 * Dirt Infiniminer.png Dirt - Makes up the bulk of the map, can have "dig here!" signs placed on it
 * Stone - Can only be removed with explosives
 * Lava - Kills players on contact, flows downwards and outwards infinitely, can only be removed with explosives
 * Metal ore - Generates in large veins, gives 20 ore points when mined
 * Gold ore - Generates in small veins, gives 100 loot points when deposited
 * Diamond ore - Generates alone, gives 1000 loot points when deposited

Artificial

 * Solid block - Comes in red and blue, a basic building material, costs 10 ore
 * Force field block - Comes in red and blue, players on the matching team pass through it while players on the opposite team collide with it, costs 25 ore
 * Road block - Players move twice as fast on top of it, costs 10 ore
 * Ladder block - Allows players to climb up and down, costs 25 ore
 * Jump block - Launches players upwards, costs 25 ore
 * Shock block - Kills players that touch its shock surface, costs 50 ore
 * Bank block - Comes in red and blue, allows players on the matching team to deposit or withdraw ore, costs 50 ore
 * Beacon block - Comes in red and blue, creates a radar waypoint that players on the matching team can see, costs 50 ore
 * Explosive block - Destroys all players and blocks besides banks, beacons, and gold and diamond ore within a 5x5x5 area when detonated, costs 100 ore

Removed

 * Teleporter block - Teleports players to random locations on the map, costs 200 ore
 * Home block - Comes in red and blue, allows players on the matching team to deposit loot, cannot be built or destroyed