Infinite Craft

Infinite Craft is a 2024 sandbox game for browsers and mobile devices developed by Neal Agarwal in which players combine interactive elements to form others. The game uses the Llama 2 large language model to create possible elements, making the gameplay seemingly infinite.

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

Gameplay
In Infinite Craft, each element has a name and related emoji. The player starts the game 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 combine to form Dust, and Earth and Dust combine to form Planet. All elements crafted by the player are saved to the sidebar, where the player can also search for crafted elements by their name.

The game uses a large language model to produce new elements, which permits a virtually infinite amount of possible combinations. These include: objects, places, poems, fictional characters, the universe, philosophical concepts, video games, sports players and teams, animals, God, and the Big Bang.

If a player is the first person to discover an element, the game labels it as a "First Discovery". 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 software developer based in New York. He developed Infinite Craft for his website, which has a collection of various browser games. The website was launched on October 26, 2017, 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. Infinite Craft was released for his website on January 31, 2024, and a mobile app was released on the iOS App Store on April 30, 2024. On May 21, 2024, a version was released on the Google Play store.

Technical details
All elements in Infinite Craft are generated by a generative AI, Llama 2. When a player combines two elements on the website, the game checks from its database if these two elements have already been combined before—if they haven't, the generative AI creates a new element which is then saved to the database. This is done to reduce repeated queries, and to ensure that the same pair of elements always outputs the same result for all players.

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, while The New York Times 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". Rock Paper Shotgun 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.