Axe'n'Stax is not a Minecraft mod and not a fork of an existing voxel engine. It's a custom engine written from zero in Rust — plus a from-scratch identity, payments, and save stack underneath it. We build on open standards, the way every company builds on Linux and HTTP. The implementations are ours.
Figures are from the game repository alone — the identity/payments/save stack below lives in its own separate repos.
Most "blockchain games" are a skin on someone else's engine. Axe'n'Stax is the opposite. There's a custom voxel engine — world format, renderer, networking, physics, the lot — and beneath it a custom stack of identity, payments, save and distribution primitives, each written from scratch. The game sits on infrastructure we also wrote.
Saying Axe'n'Stax "used open source" is like saying a car company "used roads." Everyone builds on open standards. What matters is what you built on top — and here, that's nearly all of it.
Every item here is implemented and test-covered — shipping today, not on a wish-list.
Custom voxel world format, a wgpu renderer (greedy meshing, frustum culling, a 5-tier graphics preset from Potato to Ultra), a 20 TPS authoritative tick loop, LAN multiplayer, up to 4-player split-screen on the desktop app, and an in-game command/chat system. Weather (rain, storms) is synced so everyone in a world sees the same sky. A cross-platform packaging pipeline produces native Windows, macOS and Linux builds, and the native app checks for its own updates — over a normal feed and over Nostr — and installs them in place.
Mining, tools, crafting and smelting; farming (tilling, ~10 crops, processing workstations); combat and armour; ~30 mob types with real AI; villages with professions, quests and reputation; cooking; build schematics; cosmetics; and an in-game Workshop that reskins and reshapes blocks and mobs. A guided build-along mode walks a saved Plan step by step, flagging what you're still missing. A "take it with you" export packages a whole web-taster profile into one file you can carry into the desktop app.
World chat lets players talk over the game connection itself, tiered by how well the game knows the two of you. Play by contact lets a friend join your home-hosted world directly by your Signet persona or a one-time invite link — Nostr relays carry only the initial handshake, never game traffic, and there's no AxeNStax-run server browser in the middle.
An in-game skin painter — colour wheel, dye palette, hex input, pixel grid — for repainting your look without leaving the game. A Water Wheel turns a flowing stream into power for machines. Both sit alongside the Workshop's block/mob reskinning and reshaping.
Two arcade Experiences ship in-game — Hash Dash, a 3-minute mining sprint, and Satori Rush, a race to the rarest block — built for BTC Prague.
Vendor Blocks (player-run shops), auctions, a bazaar, bounties and commissions — the first player-to-player trade paths, with Builder NPCs and tradeable build plans layered on top.
A real SHA-256 hash on every pickaxe strike, surfaced to the player as an educational proof-of-work primitive. It deterministically drives rare drops today; a parent-controlled Lightning payout path for Bitcoin-enabled servers is designed, not yet switched on — and it would never be an age wall.
This is the part people miss. These are our own primitives — written from scratch, in their own repositories, reusable across games. Not dependencies pulled off a shelf.
Decentralised identity — sign in with a Nostr persona, no passwords. Signet supports parent-held child personas.
Encrypted, ciphertext-only save primitives. Your world is yours, end-to-end — we can't read it. Bring-your-own-key cloud save on the desktop app is a later horizon, not live.
Public content distribution — share skins, scenarios and builds across the network.
Lightning rails (toll-booth / 402) plus real cryptography written in-house — ring signatures, Shamir secret sharing, range proofs, key-tree derivation. Designed as reusable rails; not yet wired into Axe'n'Stax for real-money payouts.
We didn't reinvent these, and we don't claim to: Rust, wgpu, egui for the engine and rendering, and the open money-and-identity rails — Nostr and the Lightning Network. Everything that sits on them, we wrote. Being precise about that line is the point — it's where the credibility is.
This is the velocity that's already proven — a working engine and a working stack, in about four months. Funding doesn't buy a wish-list; it compounds what's already moving.