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, 3 GPU tiers, frustum culling), a 20 TPS authoritative tick loop, LAN multiplayer, up to 4-player split-screen in the browser and native, and an in-game command/chat system. A cross-platform packaging pipeline produces native Windows, macOS and Linux builds.
Mining, tools, crafting and smelting; farming (tilling, ~17 crops, processing workstations); combat and armour; ~19 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.
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. Players browse each other's open Stash from the lobby to adopt skins and play published Experiences, distributed over Beacon.
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 and, on Bitcoin-enabled servers, Lightning payouts — parent-controlled, never 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, parent-controlled nested child accounts.
Encrypted cloud and local save. Your world is yours, end-to-end — we can't read it.
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.
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 ninety days. Funding doesn't buy a wish-list; it compounds what's already moving.