Infinite Craft

Last updated
Infinite Craft
Cover art of Infinite Craft, Neal Agarwal, 2024.svg
Developer(s) Neal Agarwal
Publisher(s) Neal Agarwal
Programmer(s) Neal Agarwal
Platform(s) Web, iOS, Android
Release
  • Web:
  • January 31, 2024
  • iOS:
  • April 30, 2024
  • Android:
  • May 21, 2024
Genre(s) Sandbox
Mode(s) Single-player

Infinite Craft is a 2024 sandbox [1] game for browsers and mobile devices developed by Neal Agarwal in which players combine elements to form others.

Contents

The main difference from similar combination games such as Little Alchemy and Doodle God [2] is that combinations are generated by a generative AI, [3] an artificial intelligence that generates content (text, in this case), which makes it possible to have practically infinite content—hence the name. [4]

Agarwal began developing the game on January 16, 2024, [5] and announced its public release 15 days later on Twitter. [6] The game became popular on the internet upon its release, gaining tens of thousands of active users. [7]

Gameplay

In Infinite Craft, the player can craft various elements using previous ones gained. Gameplay screenshot of Infinite Craft, 2024.png
In Infinite Craft, the player can craft various elements using previous ones gained.

In Infinite Craft, each element has a name and a related emoji; the player starts with four classical elements—Water, Fire, Earth, and Wind—and combines them into new elements by dragging them from the sidebar and placing them on top of each other. For example, Wind and Earth make Dust, [8] [9] and Earth and Dust make Planet. [10] [11] All elements crafted by the player are added to the sidebar, where the player can also search for crafted elements by their name. The game uses a generative AI to produce new elements, [3] which permits a virtually infinite amount of possible combinations. [4]

Because of the wide training dataset (a usual characteristic of commercial generative AIs), i.e. the texts it received which served as a base for its text generation algorithm, LLama2, [12] create a wide range of elements; they include, but are not limited to, objects, places, [13] poems, fictional characters, [14] the universe, philosophical concepts, [1] video games, sports players and teams, [15] animals, God, and the Big Bang. [4]

If a player is the first person to discover an element, the game tells them it is a "First Discovery". [1] [4] The player can also see all first discoveries they have made by clicking on the Discoveries button on the bottom of the sidebar.

Development and release

Infinite Craft was made by Neal Agarwal, a developer based in New York. [16] He developed Infinite Craft for his website, neal.fun, which has a collection of various browser games made by him. The website was launched on October 26, 2017, [17] but was popularized when Agarwal released The Password Game , in which the player needs to pick a password that abides by increasingly unusual and complicated rules. The game was released for his website on January 31, 2024, [12] and a mobile app was released on the App Store on April 30, 2024. [18] On May 21, 2024, a version was released on the Google Play store for Android. [19]

Technical details

All elements in Infinite Craft are generated by a generative AI model LLaMA2, which is hosted by Together AI. [3] [20]

The game itself runs on Neal Agarwal's servers. When a player combines two elements on the website, the game checks from its database if these two elements have already been combined before—and if they do not, a prompt is sent to LLaMA to determine the outcome, which gets saved to the game's database. This is done to reduce repeated, duplicate queries, and to ensure that the same pair of elements always outputs the same result for all players. [12]

Reception

Christian Donlan of Eurogamer compared Infinite Craft to one of his lucid dreams, explaining that an element "always [runs] away" when the player tries to figure out what elements to combine, [14] while The New York Times 's Kieran Press-Reynolds stated it was "like peering into an A.I.'s brain", adding that the game's nonsensical nature "adds to the allure". [12] Rock Paper Shotgun 's Graham Smith praised how the game was "glorious, time-stealing fun to try", commenting how "the real joy comes" when a player finds a simple way to create an element. [4]

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Litchfield, Ted (February 4, 2024). "This browser-based 'endless crafting game' starts you off with fire and water, but it quickly escalates to God, the Big Bang, and 'Yin-Yoda'". PC Gamer . Archived from the original on February 12, 2024. Retrieved February 10, 2024.
  2. ↑ Litchfield, Ted (February 4, 2024). "This browser-based 'endless crafting game' starts you off with fire and water, but it quickly escalates to God, the Big Bang, and 'Yin-Yoda'". PC Gamer. Retrieved 2024-06-17.
  3. 1 2 3 Ganguly, Sharmila (February 17, 2024). "Does Infinite Craft use AI?". Dot eSports . Archived from the original on February 17, 2024. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Smith, Graham (February 6, 2024). "Infinite Craft is a browser game in which you can craft anything, from God to Minecraft". Rock Paper Shotgun . Archived from the original on February 9, 2024. Retrieved February 10, 2024.
  5. ↑ Agarwal, Neal [@nealagarwal] (January 16, 2024). "Working on an endless crafting game with llama 2" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  6. ↑ Agarwal, Neal [@nealagarwal] (January 31, 2024). "The first version of Infinite Craft, an endless crafting game, is out now!" (Tweet). Retrieved February 18, 2024– via Twitter.
  7. ↑ Agarwal, Neal [@nealagarwal] (February 13, 2024). "I'm never going to financially recover from this" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  8. ↑ "Dust Recipe". Infinite Craft Recipes.
  9. ↑ "Dust". Infinite Craft Browser.
  10. ↑ "Planet Recipe". Infinite Craft Recipes.
  11. ↑ "Planet". Infinite Craft Browser.
  12. 1 2 3 4 Press-Reynolds, Kieran (March 4, 2024). "Playing Infinite Craft Is Like Peering Into an A.I.'s Brain". The New York Times . Archived from the original on March 6, 2024. Retrieved April 8, 2024.
  13. ↑ "Crafting the Wonders of Asia in Infinite Craft". Infinite Craft Recipes. 2024-03-20. Retrieved 2024-03-30.
  14. 1 2 Donlan, Christian (February 6, 2024). "Infinite Craft is a powerful glimpse into other minds". Eurogamer . Archived from the original on February 8, 2024. Retrieved February 10, 2024.
  15. ↑ Fay, Kacee (February 16, 2024). "How to make Minecraft in Infinite Craft". Dot eSports . Archived from the original on February 18, 2024. Retrieved February 18, 2024.
  16. ↑ Barrett, Brian (October 26, 2023). "Can anyone save the internet? Neal Agarwal is trying, one Hampster Dance at a time". Business Insider . Retrieved February 20, 2024.
  17. ↑ Agarwal, Neal [@nealagarwal] (October 26, 2017). "Today I'm launching neal.fun. It will be a collection of everything I make when I'm bored during lecture" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  18. ↑ "Infinite Craft". Apple Appstore. 19 May 2024.
  19. ↑ "Infinite Craft". Google Play Appstore.
  20. ↑ Galekovic, Filip (February 7, 2024). "What is Infinite Craft? Neal Fun's latest game, explained". Destructoid . Archived from the original on February 9, 2024. Retrieved February 11, 2024.
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