What it is
Infinite Craft is a game by neal.fun. You start with Water, Fire, Wind and Earth and combine two items to create a new one. Earth and Water make Plant, and after enough steps you can make almost anything, from Dragon to Lady Gaga.
Infinite Craft Solver tells you how. You type the item you want and get a numbered list of combinations that leads from the four starting elements to it. Lady Gaga, for example, takes 20 steps. Every item has its own shareable URL.
How it works
Collecting recipes
The game has no public recipe list, because results are generated on the fly the first time anyone combines two items. To build a dataset, a crawler asks the game which result a pair produces:
- It starts with every pairing of the four base items
- For each new item it finds, it queues combinations with every item already known
- Pairs are sorted alphabetically first, because the game treats A + B and B + A the same
The first crawler drove a real browser with Puppeteer. Two weeks in it switched to plain HTTP requests, which was far faster. Results went into PostgreSQL. The final dataset has 205,626 recipes and 31,646 unique items.
Shipping the data
The dataset is a single 3.8 MB JSON file on a CDN. To keep it small, each item name is stored once in a list, and every recipe is a triple of three indices into that list. The format is documented in the README, and you can download the file for your own projects.
Finding the shortest path
The search runs in your browser. It downloads the recipe file once, builds an index from each ingredient to the recipes that use it, and runs a Dijkstra-style search:
- The four base items cost nothing
- A recipe becomes usable only once both ingredients have been reached
- The cost of the result is the cost of both ingredients plus one step
When the target item is reached, the solver walks back through the recipes and lists them in an order where every ingredient has already been crafted. Recipes that produce one of their own inputs and recipes involving “Nothing” are filtered out.
Why it exists
Infinite Craft spread fast in early 2024, and a common question about it was how to make a specific item. The solver started in February 2024, shortly after the game came out, and most of it was built in the following twelve days.
What happened
The first version computed paths on the server and cached them in Redis. Within a week the search moved into the browser, which removed the per-request server work. The recipe dataset was last updated in April 2024.
Users reported two kinds of problems on GitHub: circular recipes (Mosquito needed Itchy, which needed Mosquito) and paths that were far longer than necessary, such as 22 steps for Human when 7 are enough. In July 2026 the original breadth-first scan was replaced with the Dijkstra search described above. It removed the server cache and the precalculated paths, deleted about 1,600 lines of code and addresses both kinds of problems.