Minicraft+ is a Ludum Dare game grown into a full 2D survival sandbox

From a weekend game jam entry to a survival sandbox

Minicraft+ is an overhaul mod of Minicraft, a game made by Markus Persson, known as Notch, in the Ludum Dare 22 contest. That origin explains the shape of the project. The Ludum Dare 22 theme was Prepare for the Unexpected, and the original entry was a single jar written in a weekend, so an overhaul of it is a fundamentally different kind of work from building a game from scratch. It starts from a codebase that already works, with a world, a player and a block grid, and extends it rather than replacing it. That inheritance is visible in the feature list. Where the original was a small survival vignette, Minicraft+ adds four gamemodes, Creative, Hardcore, Score and Survival, plus saving and loading so a session survives a restart, and a personal crafting menu, beds, mob spawners with loot, ruined structures with loot, an expanded storyline, tutorials and achievements. The framing matters for anyone evaluating the project, because the code is a mod of a jam game and inherits its architecture, which is a different proposition from a modern game engine.

The main branch breaks things on purpose

The most important line in the README is the notice at the top, and it is easy to skim past. The main branch has game breaking features during the infdev phase, and for the latest fully working repository you should use the 2.3.0-dev branch. The project also has a nightly build badge wired to an autobuild workflow on the main branch, which is the usual pattern for a game in active development: the trunk is where the next version is assembled, and the artefacts from it are not necessarily playable. That framing has consequences for two different audiences. For a player, the releases page is the place to be, and the README says to head there and find the latest version of Minicraft+, where there is a file called minicraft_plus.jar that you download and then double-click from your downloads folder. For someone reading the source, the branch choice matters even more, since a main branch that breaks the game is a poor base to fork from. The repository also carries a CodeQL analysis workflow, which is the sort of static analysis a Java project of this size benefits from.

Four gamemodes and a persistent world

The feature list separates into a group about play and a group about presentation, and the play group is where the game sits. Beyond the four gamemodes, the additions are saving and loading, more mobs, a personal crafting menu so the recipe book is the player's own rather than a global list, beds, mob spawners with loot, ruined structures with loot, an expanded storyline, key binding customization, tutorials, achievements and quests. Multiplayer mode and an account system are listed too, and the README credits them as now supported by El-Virus through a separate project, minicraft-plus-online. That credit is worth pausing on, because it tells you the multiplayer and account parts of the feature list are not implemented in this repository. What this repository contains is the game, and the presentation layer on top of it, which is where resource packs, better rendering, skins and support for several languages sit. Localization is handled through an external platform called Lokalise, and the README links a public Lokalise project so that anyone can contribute translations.

Running it from a jar, and building it with gradle

The quick path for a player is a single file. You need Java installed, at least version 8, which the README links to the system requirements page, and the game only supports Windows, macOS and Linux, with newer platform versions required for controllers. You download minicraft_plus.jar from the releases page and double-click it, and the project is also on the releases page with older versions available. For developers, the build path is gradle, and the README describes it as very easy to build or run from source. You download the source as a ZIP from the green code button, extract it, open a command prompt, and change into the folder with the cd command.

Then you type the wrapper script, gradlew run to run the game or gradlew build to build it.

On unix you add a ./ in front of the command, and on Windows with an IDE or PowerShell you add a backslash instead. If you built the project, the jar file is found in build/libs. The README also covers the most common failure, an error about missing java, which it attributes to an unconfigured JAVA_HOME environment variable, and points at a setup guide plus the option of downloading a JDK.

What the repository actually contains

The tree is small and conventional for a Java project, with build.gradle and settings.gradle at the root, the gradle/ directory, gradlew and gradlew.bat wrapper scripts, and src/ holding the code. Alongside that sit the project management files, a ChangeLog.md, Credits.md, a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, a SECURITY.md, an .editorconfig, .gitattributes and .gitignore. The ideas/ directory is the one that tells you something about how the project is run, because the README points to it and to the issues page as the place to look for current goals and ideas, which is a way of saying the roadmap is public and discussion driven rather than fixed. The licence is GPL-3.0, with a LICENSE file in the repository root, and the game is distributed under the same terms as the community around it. The top level also carries .github/ for the workflows, including the autobuild and CodeQL analysis that the badges point at.

Where Minicraft+ is the wrong project

Three honest limits. The first is that this is a game, not an engine, and the whole appeal is a specific handmade aesthetic rather than extensibility, so a team looking for a platform to build a game on will find nothing reusable here. The second is the branch and release situation. The main branch is where the infdev work happens with breaking changes, the recommended stable line is a separate branch, and the published artefacts are jars built by an autobuild workflow, so a reproducible build of what you played is not something the repository promises. The third is the multiplayer claim. The feature list mentions multiplayer mode and an account system, but the README attributes that support to a separate project, El-Virus's minicraft-plus-online, which means the online side has a different maintainer, a different codebase and its own release cycle from the game itself. For a single player or a local session, that does not matter. For a server, it is the first thing to look at, because the account system is where the complexity and the operational risk live, and it is not in this repository.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Minicraft+ if you want a small, self-contained 2D survival game to play or to study, since it ships as a single jar and the source is buildable with gradle. Skip it if you need a maintained multiplayer service, because the account and multiplayer support comes from an external project by El-Virus rather than from this repository, and skip it if you are looking for an engine, since this is a game. Before you download, read the notice at the top of the README, because the main branch has game breaking features during the infdev phase and the 2.3.0-dev branch is the one described as fully working.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: GPL-3.0
3. MinicraftPlus/minicraft-plus-revived on GitHub
4. README
5. Releases