Editing Infiniminer (section)

==History==
[[File:Infiniminer.png|thumb|A screenshot of ''Infiniminer''.]]
[[File:Infiniminer Bridge.png|thumb|A bridge across a cave.]]
[[File:Infiniminer Diamond.png|thumb|A block of diamond ore.]]
[[File:Infiniminer Sky.png|thumb|Clouds in the dark sky.]]
''Infiniminer'' was developed by Zach Barth of [http://www.zachtronics.com/ Zachtronics Industries] with the help of his friend Chris Gengler in their spare time,<ref>{{citation|url=http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/infiniminer/|title=Infiniminer|website=Zachtronics Industries|author=Zach Barth|date=April 29, 2009}}</ref> and released in steps of incremental updates during late April and early May of 2009. It quickly garnered a following on message boards around the internet, and inspired Notch to start working on ''Minecraft'' shortly 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. Many building blocks are team-colored, and most exist to serve a specific function rather than being purely decorative. Players and tools are represented by flat sprites rather than three-dimensional objects. The sky is perpetually dark, and the landscape is made up entirely of bare [[dirt]], [[stone]], [[ore]]s, 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.

''Infiniminer'' was originally intended to be played as a team-based competitive game, where the goal is to locate and excavate precious materials such as [[gold]] and [[diamond]]s, and bring the findings to the surface to earn points for one's 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 due to the developers forgetting to obfuscate a new release, which allowed players 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, making the server browser nonfunctional,<ref>{{tweet|zachtronics|616389728716259332|Earlier today we shut down the Infiniminer server browser... truly the end of an era.|July 1, 2015}}</ref> but direct connection to servers is still possible. The game is still available for download, and the source code of ''Infiniminer'' is available under the MIT License. Building ''Infiniminer'' requires Visual Studio 2008 and XNA Game Studio 3.0.<ref>{{link|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101006034435/http://github.com/krispykrem/Infiniminer|title=Infiniminer|website=Github}}</ref> Infiniminer is also included in [https://www.zachtronics.com/zach-like/ Zach-Like], a Zachtronics book and game bundle.

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]]''.