PickCrafter

As peculiar as it may sound, many gamers enjoy the mining process in Minecraft, even if it’s just a means to an end. Although the ultimate goal is to use the resources you dig up in order to craft things and build structures, just playing with a pickaxe can be tons of fun under the right circumstances. Hence, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a whole game can be based on this concept alone.

PickCrafter is a clicker game in which you basically use a pickaxe in order to dig for hours on end, with the ultimate goal being to use the materials for upgrades and certain crafting recipes. However, the crafting and everything else takes the backseat in this case, since the mining is the core gameplay element. It’s far from a revolutionary formula, but it just might be addictive enough to catch you in its spell.

You start with a simple wooden pickaxe and a tutorial that has you gathering a certain number of materials, which are then used to explain how crafting works. Naturally, the goal is to upgrade your pick with better and tougher materials, but it is also possible to dig up treasure chests. There are ways to increase your productivity and even gain resources while you are not clicking.

Although one click amounts to just one block in the beginning, you quickly advance to much higher numbers, depending of course on the type of pick you use, as well as all the other upgrades working in the background. It’s even possible to craft armor pieces for your character, as well as toy around with drills and similar instruments that speed up the digging process quite a bit.

As mentioned before, there are treasure chests that can be found, which contain rare elements and special materials required for certain upgrades. You can purchase these using a special resource you earn along the way, or simply by spending real money. The visual style is borrowed directly from Minecraft as well, although there are a few different textures here and there.

All things considered, PickCrafter probably won’t become your new favorite game, but it’s a great background activity if you need some kind of distraction every now and again. There are enough upgrades to unlock for the game to remain fun over long periods of time.