Mine64

An infinite-world block-building game for the Nintendo 64. Runs on a stock console — no Expansion Pak, no Minecraft assets, terrain generated as you walk.

Features

World

• Endless in every direction — no borders, no loading screens, no map edge
• Terrain streamed and generated on the fly from a seed; walk back and it's the same
• Biomes: plains, forest, desert, jungle, highland, scree
• Oceans, lakes, rivers, mountains, cliffs, beaches, cave networks
• Trees that grow to fit — open-grown oaks spread wide, forest oaks go tall
• Hamlets, ruins and waystones to find
• Day/night cycle with a tilted sun and real moon phases; moonlight actually lights the ground
• Four world shapes (classic, islands, skylands, flat) plus toggles for caves, ruins, forests, critters, peaceful and bonus kit
• Original 16-colour tile art and UI font, generated at build time

Play

• Mine, place, and craft — no puzzle grid, ingredients come from your pack
• Wood/stone/iron tool tiers, each with its own in-hand silhouette
• Each sword tier has a special on L + B: a lunge, a wide cleave, a shockwave
• Cook meat over coal — a cooked cut is worth roughly twice a raw one
• Torches, doors, stairs, glass windows
• Hearts and hunger, fall damage, sprinting, swimming, ledge vaulting
• Hostile mobs at night that wind up visibly before they strike
• The Moon phase decides the night: a full Moon is crowded and spider-heavy, a new Moon nearly empty and never a spider
• Sheep, pigs and chickens that track you, flee, breed and raise young
• Split-screen co-op for up to four players on one console
• Three save slots on flashcart SD, checksummed with backup-on-write
• 64MON: optional creature-collecting mod with turn-based battles fought in-world, no battle screen — see docs/64mon.md

Controls

Control	Action
Analog stick	Left/right steers, up/down walks
Hold L	Sprint
Hold Z	Look around without turning
Z + C-up	Swap steering for strafing
A	Place, open door, use table, feed animal, eat
B	Hold to mine, tap to punch
L + B	Sword special — lunge, cleave or shockwave by tier
R	Jump; hold to swim up
L + R while moving	Vault a one-block ledge
C-up	First / third person
C-left / C-right	Cycle hotbar
START or C-down	Open the pack
D-pad	Save
Controller 2–4 START	Join co-op

The stick is a rudder, not a strafe: sideways turns you, so the camera always points where you're going and lining up on the block in front of you never means shuffling away from it. Z + C-up swaps it if you'd rather strafe.

Building

Build the SDK image once, then the ROM:

docker build --platform linux/amd64 -t mine64-nusys-build:local -f docker/N64SDK.Dockerfile .

docker run --rm --platform linux/amd64 -v "$PWD:/work" -w /work mine64-nusys-build:local make -j2

Output is build/mine64.n64. With a SummerCart64 attached, ./live-load builds and streams to cart RAM; ./perma-load writes it to the cart's SD card.

Full setup, deployment and the texture/music/SFX pipelines: docs/building.md.

Tools

tools/preview rasterises the game's own models on your machine, straight from the vertex data in the source — the fast way to answer anything about pose, framing or occlusion without booting a console:

tools/preview/mob.py pig --strip head-turn

tools/emu drives mupen64plus through a scripted controller timeline for repeatable GUI screenshots. Neither tool settles performance or RDP behaviour; those belong on hardware.

Docs

Internals	Endless-world streaming, meshing, save format, known gaps
Hardware notes	Freeze diagnostics and hardware faults emulators don't reproduce
RAM budget	Where the console's memory goes
Building	SDK, ROM builds, flashcart deployment, asset pipelines
64MON	Type chart, roster, design notes
People	The shared human body, the cast, and the villagers
Offline preview	tools/preview reference
Emulator screenshots	tools/emu script grammar
Custom textures	Art-to-cartridge workflow

Credits

Perlin noise by nowl. Cartridge file access via devwizard's libcart; the src/ff and include/ff directories come from that project.