Idle Block Miner
Live
Tap the ore, hire miners and machines, and dig from a sunny stone quarry down to the lava depths. The coins pay for a village of nine buildings on the surface, gear for your crew and, at the end, a castle that starts New Game+ with permanent perks. Your crew keeps digging while you are away. Play it in the browser or on Android.
- Status
- Live
- Category
- Game
- Started
- Nov 2026
- Launched
- Nov 2026
- Stack
- React 19, TypeScript, Vite
- AI
- Claude Code, ChatGPT, Nano Banana 2
Idle Block Miner
A cosy pixel-art idle game: dig deep, hire a crew of tiny miners and build a village above your mine.
Story
Problem
Idle games are relaxing, but many feel like a spreadsheet: numbers go up and nothing on screen comes alive.
Idea
Make the progress something you can see: a little mine full of blocky workers, and a village that grows above it as you play.
Solution
A pixel-art idle game where every hire shows up as a worker on a mine floor, every coin can build the village, and a finished castle starts the run again, stronger.
Key features
- Four regions to dig through, from Stone Quarry to Lava Depths, with 12 producers to hire and upgrade
- A living mine: up to 10 chibi workers on scrolling floors, with minecarts, lanterns and chatty crew
- A village of 9 buildings with 5 levels each, built in timed stages with cranes and builders
- Gear for the crew (pickaxe, helmet, minecart and more) that levels up through six material tiers
- Goals, achievements, a 7-day daily reward streak and offline earnings while you are away
- New Game+ after the castle: a new look and Star Shards to spend on permanent perks
Screenshots
How it was built
The game runs on IdleForge, a small idle-game engine I wrote alongside it in plain TypeScript. All the content (producers, upgrades, buildings, missions, prestige) lives in one validated JSON file, and a player simulator in the tests checks the pacing for active, casual and idle players.
The front end is React with Vite, hosted on Cloudflare Pages, with a small self-hosted analytics dashboard on Cloudflare D1 to see whether playtesters enjoy it. Capacitor wraps the same build for Android and iOS.
Claude Code wrote most of the code. The art mixes my own pixel cuts, a few pieces generated with Nano Banana 2 and Retro Diffusion, and icons and pictures drawn directly in code.
Devlog
Idle Block Miner goes to production on Google Play
After a week of internal testing builds, version 7 went to the production track on Google Play. It fixes a cloud save bug that could reload an older copy of your progress when you came back to the app, and it adds a "Leave the mine?" check on the Android Back button. The game is now public on Google Play and still free to play in the browser.
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