This wiki has been updated 23 times since it was first published in January of 2017. The Overworld is home to everything from dangerous, hostile monsters to friendly animal companions. How do you make these characters even cuter? Turn them into plushies, of course. These Minecraft toys make an adorable addition to a household, whether they are for children to sleep with or adults to enjoy.
Just make sure to check for choking or other hazard warnings, if buying one for a youngster.When users buy our independently chosen editorialselections,we may earn commissions tohelp fund the Wiki.Skip to. This wiki has been updated 23 times since it was first published in January of 2017. The Overworld is home to everything from dangerous, hostile monsters to friendly animal companions. How do you make these characters even cuter? Turn them into plushies, of course. These Minecraft toys make an adorable addition to a household, whether they are for children to sleep with or adults to enjoy.
Just make sure to check for choking or other hazard warnings, if buying one for a youngster.When users buy our independently chosen editorialrecommendations,we may earn commissions tohelp fund the Wiki.Skip to. Editor's NotesNovember 13, 2019:The best Minecraft plush toy is a very subjective topic that will vary based on age and how long you've been playing the game.Those who have been playing since it was first released to the public in 2009 might be partial to the quirky who has been part of the game from the start. It's also the only character on this list that makes a noise, but we didn't rank it first because many are disappointed that the batteries are not replaceable (unless you are willing to cut it open and sew it back together).We updated the list a little by removing the Baby Sheep and adding the who came to the game in a later beta version.We replaced the Zombie Pigman who rarely appears in the game with the useful.
According to wikipedia citation needed even though minecraft carries most resemblance to infiniminer, notch also was greatly influenced by games like rollercoaster tycoon, dwarf fortress, and dungeon keeper. I also believe that infiniminer was the final inspiration for notch to implement the ideas he already hadcitation needed. And in this case, to facilitate a marathon session of Infiniminer. We play a game. What kind of game? It’s a bit like Minecraft, but more limited and less popular. And thus, far.
It's large and flat enough for kids to use as a pillow and everyone knows who Steve is. Minecraft is considered by many in the gaming world as the. Sandbox video games are characterized by not having a linear structure (i.e. No levels to complete), and giving gamers access to the entire world, which they can roam and alter at will. Each user has a completely different experience limited only by their imagination, much like a young child playing in a sandbox at the local park.While realistic, high quality graphics are often a major selling point for the majority of video games, Minecraft consists of a simple world created with low-resolution blocks representing various resources. Despite it's simplicity, one only need to view the creations of some to appreciate the deep complexity of this game.Even the adorable and popular characters in the game are boxy figures that appear to be constructed from Legos.
Some of the most important features of the Minecraft universe are the mobs of critters and creatures that appear throughout the game. Some are friendly and useful, like the herds of pigs or sheep, and a few are destructive and add a layer of difficulty, like the creepers and zombies. All of them make for great plushie friends.New players are dropped into a plain landscape and charged with “mining” for the various resources they need to build an infinite variety of structures; from shelters to protect them from the occasional monster, to barns for the cute animals they'll find roaming the landscape, to entire cities for their friends if they choose the multi-player mode.
Despite beginning with almost child-like simplicity, the unlimited complexity of the game has even launched a cottage industry of.Another feature that makes this game so popular is that several modes are available, appealing to players with different objectives. The creative mode is for peace-loving types who just want to build without the bother of monsters and zombies to distract them from their work. This mode also allows for infinite access to resources. In the survival and adventure modes, players will need to ward off attackers while struggling to find the materials they need.
Most modes can be further customized with four difficulty options, from peaceful to hard. Is Minecraft Educational?With the endless possibilities and scenarios available, when it comes to a game like Minecraft, can be a serious concern. But with proper supervision and limits, parents and educators alike have discovered a variety of educational benefits, from academic to real-world skills.Planning ahead, setting and achieving goals, and problem-solving are required of every person, young or old, who ventures into the Minecraft universe.A few intrepid teachers have even built multi-player worlds customized for their classrooms.
While there are obvious lessons to exercises like this, such as creativity and cooperation, some contend the benefits don't stop there. Socially, students are given tangible proof of the importance of teamwork.
Children who play these sorts of building games also increase their visuospatial cognition, which can be helpful in solving complex math problems in the future. Studies have even shown that video game play can be helpful in.Minecraft is the ideal sort of game to introduce into the classroom as their are few barriers to entry. The game can be played on any PC or laptop and does not require the purchase of any expensive gaming systems or special controllers. Students can even play the most basic version of the game online for free.Many parents have noticed that Minecraft develops important life skills that kids don't usually get at school. Players are given a finite amount of resources to build whatever they choose and so are forced to make constant cost-benefit decisions of how much to spend vs. How much to save for the future. In addition, anyone obsessed with this game learns the satisfaction of delayed gratification, as those elaborate structures take time and patience to construct.
Planning ahead, setting and achieving goals, and problem-solving are required of every person, young or old, who ventures into the Minecraft universe.The simple world of Minecraft can also be enhanced with the addition of. Mods work within the original software to change the look and feel of the game, add features, or create alternate biomes. Often these are created with the Minecraft Coder Pack. Advanced players who are inspired by the work of others become motivated to learn and improve their coding skills.
A Brief History Of MinecraftThe history of Minecraft is, indeed, surprisingly brief, especially when one considers that it has sold over 70 million copies, more than any other PC game in history. It was created and designed in 2009 by Swedish game designer.The history of Minecraft is, indeed, surprisingly brief, especially when one considers that it has sold over 70 million copies, more than any other PC game in history.Like most video games, the concept for Minecraft was heavily influenced by other games the developer enjoyed. In the case of Persson, his childhood love of Legos and the online indie cult favorite Dwarf Fortress inspired the simplicity and the open-ended nature of play. In the spring of 2009, a competitive mining game called Infiniminer was released as open source code, and Persson used the blockish graphics and first person point-of-view as major aspects of his ongoing project.By June of that year, Persson began charging a small fee for the alpha version of the game, and continued developing the game in an open dialog with users, taking into consideration their comments and suggestions. In late 2010, with the money earned from these sales, Persson was able to realize his dream of forming his own gaming company,. This focus allowed Minecraft to progress to beta release by December of 2010, and by January of 2011, the fledgling video game had already surpassed one million sales.As Minecraft continued to evolve and grow in immense popularity, various modes of play were added, and enthusiastic users customized the game with their own mods, yet the game retained a simplistic style at its core. Mojang and Minecraft were bought by Microsoft in September of 2014 for a whopping 2.5 billion dollars.
The game continues to grow with pocket versions for tablet and mobile phones, as well as a spin-off called Minecraft: Story Mode. Last updated on November 16, 2019 byTina Morna Freitas is a writer who lives in Chicago with her family and three cats. She has a B.A. In anthropology with a minor in English, and has built a freelance career over the years in writing and digital marketing. Her passions for cooking, decorating and home improvement contribute to her extensive knowledge of all things kitchen and home goods. In addition, her 20 years as a parent inform her expertise in the endless stream of toys and equipment that inevitably takes over the homes of most parents. She also enjoys gardening, making and sipping margaritas, and aspires to be a crazy cat lady once all the children are grown.
Thanks for reading the fine print. About the Wiki: We don't accept sponsorships,free goods, samples, promotional products, or other benefits from any of the product brands featured on this page, exceptin cases where those brands are manufactured by the retailer to which we are linking.For more information on our rankings, please read about us, linked below. The Wiki is a participant in associate programsfrom Amazon, Walmart, Ebay, Target, and others, and may earn advertising feeswhen you use our links to these websites. These fees will not increase your purchase price,which will be the same as any direct visitor to the merchant’s website.If you believe that your product should be includedin this review, you may contact us, but we cannot guarantee a response, even if you send us flowers.
(Redirected from Infiniminer)
Zachtronics
Industry
Video games
Founded
2000; 20 years ago
Founders
Zach Barth
Headquarters
,
United States
Products
TIS-100, SpaceChem, Infinifactory
Owner
Zach Barth
Parent
Alliance Media Holdings
Website
www.zachtronics.com
Zachtronics LLC is an American independent video game development studio, best known for their engineering puzzle games and programming games. Zachtronics was founded by Zach Barth, who serves as its lead designer.[1]
History[edit]
Zachtronics' founder Zach Barth (left) and frequent musician-composer for the studio Matthew Burns, at the 2019 Game Developers Choice Awards
Zachtronics was founded by American video game designer and programmer Zach Barth. Barth started creating games early in life and further developed his programming skills at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where he joined the game development club.[2][3] Barth studied computer systems engineering and computer science at RPI. He was one of three students leading the interdisciplinary team of the CapAbility Games Research Project, a collaboration of RPI with the Center for Disability Services in Albany, New York. In 2008, the team produced Capable Shopper, a shopping simulation game for players with various degrees of disability.[4][5]
Barth's initial games were generally free browser games offered on his website. One of these was Infiniminer, the block-building precursor game of Minecraft by Mojang.[6] His earlier, non-commercial, games included twenty that were published on his old website and 'five good ones' which he transferred over to the new site. Four of these use Flash to make them cross-platform, in spite of Flash's 'terrible' development environment. The other one is based on .NET for greater programming convenience. SpaceChem also used .NET, as Barth considers C# to be 'the best language ever invented'. For marketing reasons, Barth decided against XNA with its capability to cross-publish to Xbox 360, and switched to OpenGL, which allowed him to target the three operating systems required for inclusion in the Humble Indie Bundle.[2]
After completing The Codex of Alchemical Engineering and getting positive feedback from it, Barth came up with the idea of making commercial games. The first of these was SpaceChem, which he developed the Zachtronics label for. It was also the first game where he took in a number of collaborators to help.[2]SpaceChem was critically praised, which led Barth to continue to develop more games under the Zachtronics label. A few ideas failed to come to light, and with expectations for the studio to make another game, he opted to make Ironclad Tactics, which was more a real-time based card game rather than a puzzle game.[7]Ironclad Tactics did not do as well as SpaceChem, and Barth realized there was more a market for the puzzle games that he had previously developed, and turned back to his Flash-based games. Initially he looked to take The Codex of Alchemical Engineering to make it a full commercial release, but instead ended up producing Infinifactory and later TIS-100.[7]
In 2015, Barth joined Valve to work on SteamVR.[8] He worked there for 10 months before departing.[9] Near the time he started to work at Valve, Barth had been considering shutting down Zachtronics due to stress of running the business alongside the new responsibilities at Valve. Sometime between the release of TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O, Barth had come into contact with Alliance Media Holdings who offered to buy the studio and to manage the publishing of the games, while allowing Barth retain his creative lead and control.[7]
Since the studio's acquisition, it has published Shenzhen I/O, Opus Magnum, a spiritual successor to The Codex, and Exapunks.[7]
In June 2019, the studio has published the book Zach-Like that includes design documents and other reference material used by Barth and his team during the development of his games.[10][11] Zachtronics used Kickstarter to produce physical copies of the book by early 2019, and by June 2019 released title as a free eBook on Steam along with a bundle of Barth's older titles.[12]
Zachtronics launched Zachademics in June 2019, a program to allow educational and non-profit institutions to freely download and use Infinifactory, TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, Opus Magnum and Exapunks for educational purposes.[13] Zachtronics has previously offered SpaceChem in a similar manner.
Games developed[edit]
Zachtronics' games have generally been focused around engineering puzzle games, designing machines or the equivalent to take input and make output; these are generally part of the broader class of programming games. These games, including SpaceChem, Infinifactory, and Opus Magnum, feature multiple puzzles that are open ended in solution; as long as the player can make the required output, the game considers that puzzle solved and allows the player to access the next puzzle. Atop their solution, the player is shown statistics related to their solution which relate to some efficiency - how fast their solution completed the puzzle, how few parts they used, and the like. These stats are given with histograms from other players, including their friends via the game's storefront, that have also completed that puzzle. This gives a type of competitiveness to the game for players to find ways to optimize their solutions and improve their relative scores. Newer games also feature support for user-created puzzles.
Infiniminer[edit]
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 maps and building structures. According to the author Barth, it was based on the earlier games Infinifrag, Team Fortress, and Motherload by XGen Studios.[1][14]
Barth wrote Infiniminer in his spare time, with the help of a friend, and released it in steps of incremental updates during April–May 2009. It quickly garnered a following on message boards around the Internet.[citation needed]
Infiniminer was originally intended to be played as a team-based competitive game, where the goal is to locate and excavate precious metals, and bring the findings to the surface to earn points for the player's team.[15] However, as the game gained popularity, players gravitated towards the emergent gameplay functionality of building in-world objects, instead of the stated design goal of competition.
Zachtronics discontinued development of the game less than a month after its first release as the result of its source code leak. As Barth had not obfuscated the C# .NET source code of the game, it was decompiled and extracted from the binaries. Hackers modified the code to make mods, but also started making clients that would target vulnerabilities in the game as well as build incompatible game forks that fragmented its user base. Barth, who was making the game for free, then lost interest and dropped the project, as development of the game had become too difficult.[2] The source code of Infiniminer is now available under the MIT License.[16] Building Infiniminer requires Visual Studio 2008 and XNA Game Studio 3.0.[17]
Infiniminer is the game that initially inspired Minecraft (and subsequently FortressCraft, CraftWorld and Ace of Spades). The visuals and mechanics of procedural generation and terrain deformation of Minecraft were drawn from Infiniminer.[18] According to Minecraft developer Markus Persson, after he discovered Infiniminer, he 'decided it was the game he wanted to do'.[19]
SpaceChem[edit]
Zachtronics is also known for its puzzle game SpaceChem in which the player creates chemical pathways similar in style to visual programming.
SpaceChem has garnered praise with the gaming community and is currently one of three games on the recommendation page of Team Fortress creator Robin Walker (the others being Hotline Miami and FTL: Faster Than Light), with him declaring it as 'Pretty much the greatest game ever made'.[20][21]
In March 2011, Barth stated the possibility of making expansion packs to SpaceChem and adding a free update and editor which would allow users to create their own levels which could then be shared to other users, with the best ones being picked out by Zachtronics to be published and these were released on April 29 as the Shareholders' Update.[22] Barth hinted at the prospect of a sequel and also stated that it would be fantastic to have SpaceChem on a future Humble Bundle.[2] The game was included in the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle charitable sale in early October 2011.[23] The following year SpaceChem was the featured game on IndieGameStand, a site which features indie games with a pay-what-you-want model with a portion of the proceeds going to charity. Barth chose the Against Malaria Foundation as the charity to which 10% of the proceeds were donated.[24]
Other games[edit]
The Codex of Alchemical Engineering
Magnum Opus Challenge
Ruckingenur II
Bureau of Steam Engineering
KOHCTPYKTOP (конструктор / Constructor) Playable game (web version)
Shenzhen I/O[25]
Opus Magnum[26]
Exapunks[27]
Eliza[28]
MOLEK-SYNTEZ[29]
References[edit]
^ abSmith, Quintin (January 20, 2011). 'My Chemical Romance: Zach Barth Interview'. Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
^ abcdeRose, Michael (March 8, 2011). 'Podcast 17 Zach Barth on SpaceChem and Infiniminer'. Indie Games Podcast.
^'Zach Barth finds a fine formula with SpaceChem', Featured Indie Dev, Indie pub games.
^'Gaining Independence For People With Disabilities Through Video Games', ScienceDaily, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 15 May 2008, retrieved 2011-08-24.
^Original news release, RPI.
^'Reliquary Game Reviews: Infiniminer'. Reliquary Game Reviews. 2009-05-29.
^ abcdCaldwell, Brendan (November 23, 2017). 'Zach of Zachtronics: 'I really like making my dumb little games that don't matter''. Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved November 24, 2017.
^Wawro, Alex. 'Valve collaborates on new Unity SteamVR support and tools'. www.gamasutra.com. Retrieved 8 April 2019.
^Wawro, Alex. 'Zachtronics' Shenzhen I/O is a game for people who code games'. www.gamasutra.com. Retrieved 8 April 2019.
^Kidwell, Emma (February 6, 2019). 'Exapunks dev creates 400-page behind-the-scenes design book'. Gamasutra. Retrieved February 6, 2019.
^Kerr, Chris (June 18, 2019). 'Check out Opus Magnum dev Zachtronics' entire game design history for free'. Gamasutra. Retrieved June 18, 2019.
^Tarason, Dominic (June 19, 2019). 'Zach-Like comes to Steam free with loads of game-like extras'. Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved June 21, 2019.
^Wawro, Alex (July 3, 2019). 'Zachtronics games are now free for public schools and educational nonprofits'. Gamasutra. Retrieved July 3, 2019.
^Motherload, XGen studios.
^Murff, James. 'Freeware Friday: Infiniminer'. Big Download. Retrieved May 15, 2009.
^Zachtronics Industries. 'Infiniminer Google Code Project Page'. Google.
^Team Fortress Development Team (April 28, 2011). 'Mounts and Blades and Hats and Fires and Hats and Swords'. Valve.
^SpaceChem Team (April 29, 2011). 'Shareholders' Report'. Zachtronics Industries.
^Zacny, Rob (2011-10-05). 'SpaceChem joins the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle'. PC Gamer. Retrieved 2011-10-05.
^Phillips, Tom (2012-10-03). 'Pay-what-you-want indie games site launches, spotlights SpaceChem'. Eurogamer. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
^O'Conner, Alice (September 13, 2016). 'SpaceChem & TIS-100 Creator Announces SHENZEN I/O'. Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved September 13, 2016.
^Devore, Jordan (October 19, 2017). 'Opus Magnum is the new game from the creator of SpaceChem'. Destructoid. Retrieved October 19, 2017.
^Tarason, Dominic (July 18, 2018). 'Hack the planet in Exapunks from Opus Magnum & Shenzhen I/O studio Zachtronics'. Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved July 18, 2018.
^O'Conner, Alice (August 1, 2019). 'The next Zachtronics game is Eliza, a visual novel about AI'. Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved August 1, 2019.
^Pearson, Craig (November 5, 2019). 'MOLEK-SYNTEZ is a new Zachtronics game about making drugs in a cold Romanian apartment'. Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved November 5, 2019.
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zachtronics&oldid=944996542#Infiniminer'