A PIG VS BOAR GAME
Eleven worlds made of blocks, each ten thousand blocks across, and you are standing in them. Dig, build, farm, tame a pig, and work your way up through pickaxes, axes, shovels and armour — through sand, snow, ash, giant glowing mushrooms and islands floating in the sky, all the way down to the runestone and out through a portal to the piggerite. Watch the weather, watch the dark, and keep an eye on how hungry you are.
Eleven of them. Each is its own place, with its own ground, its own ores and its own sky. What you dug in one stays dug — come back and it is how you left it.
Click the world once and the mouse becomes your head. Esc gives it back and brings up a menu you can click.
While the mouse belongs to the world, no button on the page can be clicked — that is how looking around works. Every one of them has a key, and Esc brings up the menu.
| Look | move the mouse |
|---|---|
| Walk | W A S D or the arrows |
| Run | tap W twice and hold it |
| Creep | hold Shift — slow, and you cannot walk off an edge |
| Jump | Space |
| Mine | hold the left mouse button |
| Build | right-click, or hold Shift and click |
| Choose a slot | 1–9, or the mouse wheel |
| Your bag | B or I |
| Full screen | G, or the ⛶ button |
| Stuck? | U, or the 🆘 button |
| Throw it out | Q — hold Ctrl (or Shift) for the whole stack. In your bag, a chest or your pig's bag it throws out whatever you are pointing at. |
| Eat | F |
| Crafting | E |
| Enchanting | R |
| Worlds | M |
| Places and homes | N |
| The map | K |
| Call your pig | T — wherever it has got to, it appears beside you |
| Trophies | Y — next door to T, which your pig has now |
| Open a chest | right-click it |
| Open a door | right-click it |
| Use a furnace | right-click it |
| Plant berries | hold 🫐 and right-click earth |
| Climb a ladder | Space up, Shift to hold on |
| Glide | hold the 🪂 and press Space while falling |
On a phone: slide your left thumb to walk, your right thumb to look, and use the 🍎 👋 ▲ 🐾 ⛏️ 🧱 buttons to eat, drop, jump, creep, mine and build. 🐾 stays on until you press it again.
You can only mine what your pickaxe is hard enough for. Wood gets you stone, stone gets you iron, iron gets you gold, gold gets you gems, and gems get you ⬛ piggerite — which is only in 🌀 The Rift, on the other side of a portal you build. Dig down, find the ore, make the next pickaxe, and the next world opens up.
Planks, sticks and the table itself you can make anywhere. Everything else needs a crafting table on the ground next to you — so make one early, and take a spare when you go deep.
A pickaxe for stone and ore, an axe for wood, a shovel for earth and snow. You do not have to choose — the right one is used for you. Only the pickaxe decides what you may mine; the others just make it quicker.
A helmet, body armour and boots, in stone, iron, gold or gem. Every piece takes a bite out of anything that hurts you. A full set of gem takes three quarters of it — which is what makes a deep drop survivable.
The bar next to your hearts goes down as you walk, run and dig. Press F to eat the smallest thing in your bag — 🫐 berries from bushes up top, 🍄 mushrooms in the dark, 🍎 apples out of leaves. Eat well and your hearts come back on their own. Let it get to nothing and you will be worn down to one heart, so eat before you dig deep.
Under the islands, a hundred and sixty blocks down, there used to be one layer of bedrock and nothing else. Now there are the Deeproots: a dark basalt floor with pillars rising out of it, lit by its own glowrock, with 🍄 mushrooms to eat and four times as much ore as ordinary ground — iron, gold, gems and runestone. It is the hardest place in the game to get to and back from. Nothing will ever put you down there by accident; if a saved game leaves you stranded at the bottom, you are brought back up to an island.
If there is really no way out — the bottom of the Skylands with nothing left to build with, or a hole you dug and cannot climb — press U and you go back to where you came into that world. You keep everything.
It will not work while you are falling, while lava is within seven blocks, or while something is hurting you. That is on purpose: a button that got you out of anything would mean nothing in the game could ever go wrong. There is a twenty-second wait between uses.
Two of you, on the same Wi-Fi, in the same worlds. Whoever is hosting installs Node.js once, then double-clicks start-lan-server.bat in the pig-craft folder — start-lan-server.command on a Mac. A black window opens and prints two links: the first is for that computer, the second is the one your friend types in. Leave the window open while you play, and close it when you are done. (If you would rather type it yourself, it is node server.js in that folder.)
You will see each other walking about, and every block either of you digs or builds shows up for the other straight away. What you build together is kept on the host's computer. Your own game is never touched by it — your pig, your bag and your tunnels are exactly as you left them when you go back to playing on your own.
Make a bucket out of 3 iron. Point it at water or lava to fill it, and right-click to pour it back out. Both of them run downhill — water four blocks, lava two — and dry up again the moment you take the source away.
A pool of four water sources in a square never runs out: take one and the other three make another. Lava does not do that, so a bucket of lava is a bucket of lava.
The clutch. Falling a long way? Look down and right-click a bucket of water. If there is nothing in front of you the water goes on whatever is underneath, up to fourteen blocks down — so it lands before you do, and water means no fall damage at all.
Thirty-six slots — nine on the hotbar and twenty-seven behind them — each holding up to 99 of one thing. Press I to open it, then click one slot and another to swap them round. Your three tools and three pieces of armour have slots of their own up top; you never choose between them, they are used for you.
Q throws one thing onto the floor and Ctrl+Q throws the whole stack. Out in the world that is whatever is in your hand; on your bag, a chest or your pig's bag it is whatever the mouse is pointing at. It lands, it stays there, and you can walk back over it. Anything that will not fit in a full bag lands on the floor too, and so does half of what you carry when you die — at the spot where you fell, so you can go back for it.
Nine ⚫ coal, 🔩 iron, 🟡 gold, 💎 gem or ⬛ piggerite pack into one block of it at a crafting table, and every block comes apart into its nine again whenever you like. Ninety-nine blocks of gem in one slot is 891 gems — which is what turns a 📦 chest into somewhere you can keep a whole morning's mining. They are good-looking blocks to build with too.
Once you have somewhere to live, there is something to make it out of: 🧱 stone bricks, ⬜ smooth stone, 🪟 glass you can actually see through, 🏮 lanterns, and blocks in eight colours. Each colour is stone plus something that colour — 🫐 berries for red, ⚫ coal for black, 💠 crystal for blue, ✨ runes for purple — which is what finally gives berries and coal a job once you have eaten and lit enough.
Press K for a map: the ground straight down from overhead, a block a pixel, three hundred blocks across. Water is blue, lava is orange, trees are dark green dots. 🟡 marks a home of yours and 🩷 is you, pointing the way you are looking. It shows the ground the game is holding, so walking makes more of it appear.
Press Y for trophies — eight of them, and between them they are everything this game has to show you: every world, every living thing, every kind of ruin, every pickaxe, the best armour there is, every enchantment, a pig of your own, and the Boarlord. Each one fills up as you go.
🐷 Wild pigs potter about in 🌳 The Meadow, 🏜️ The Dunes, ❄️ The Frostfields and 🍄 The Hollow. They are won over with truffles, and truffles are under the ground: dig grass and dirt anywhere, and look wherever mushrooms grow. Hold one and right-click a wild pig. A plain 🍄 truffle takes four; a 🌟 golden truffle is worth two of them; a ❤️ piggerite truffle — five piggerite around one truffle — makes it yours in a single mouthful.
Once it is yours, right-click it to open its own screen. Tell it to 🐾 follow you, ✋ wait where it is, 🪵 fetch logs — it finds the nearest tree, chops it and carries the wood back in its own bag — 🧱 fill in holes, where it walks along behind you laying blocks out of its bag into any gap in the ground — or 🌉 lay a path under itself, where it puts a block under its own trotters whenever there is nothing there, so it walks straight out over a gap, or over water, or over lava, and you can follow it across. It has nine slots you can put things into and take things out of, the same way as a chest.
🛡️ Barding is armour for a pig: iron, gem or piggerite, five of the material and two sticks at a crafting table. A pig with no coat loses to a boar. In piggerite it hits seven harder and hardly notices being hit at all — and you can see which coat it has on from across a field. It follows you everywhere, into The Deep and through 🌀 The Rift, and it goes for anything that comes at you. You get one pig at a time.
The game is called Pig vs Boar, and now there is a boar to beat. Make a 📯 boar horn (4 piggerite, 8 runes, 4 gold) and blow it in 🌀 The Rift. He has 140 hearts, hits for 6, and is faster than you. Bring the best armour you own, 🛡️ Protection IV, a piggerite pickaxe and your pig.
Beat him and he leaves 12 ⬛ piggerite, 24 ✨ runes and 👑 The Boar Crown — which nothing else in the game will ever give you.
A 🔥 furnace is 8 stone. Put it down and right-click it. Everything in it burns one ⚫ coal — which is finally a proper job for coal. 4 sand → 🪟 4 glass, 4 stone → 🧱 4 bricks, 2 🍄 mushrooms → 🍖 a roast worth 7, and 2 🍎 apples → 🥧 a baked apple worth 6. Cooked food fills you up far more than the raw thing did.
🌱 Plant berries. Hold 🫐 berries, right-click grass or dirt, and a sprout goes in. Half a minute later it is a full bush you can pick — and a bush gives you two berries, so a patch of them feeds you for ever. It only grows where you are, and it keeps growing when you come back.
Sometimes it rains. 🌧️ Rain in the green worlds, 🌨️ snow in ❄️ The Frostfields, 🌫️ ashfall in 🌋 The Ashlands and 🔥 The Emberdeep. It comes for a minute or two at a time and then clears, the sky goes dull, the far edge closes in, and the little picture next to the clock tells you what is falling. Worlds with a lid over them never get any, because there is no sky up there to have weather in.
🎵 There is music now — not a recording, but notes picked out of each world's own scale as you play, two or three a second with long gaps. 🌳 The Meadow is bright, ❄️ The Frostfields are cold, 🕳️ The Deep is low and 🌀 The Rift is properly unpleasant. You can hear which world you are in with your eyes shut. Turn it off with the 🎵 Music button in the pause menu; it remembers.
🪜 Ladders — 4 sticks and a plank makes 3. Put them up a wall and hold Space to climb, Shift to hold on where you are, or nothing at all to slide down slowly. A ladder needs something to lean on, and one can hang off the one above it. Sliding down one never hurts, however far it goes.
🚪 Doors — 6 planks makes 2. One goes down two blocks tall and opens as one, so you can walk through it. Right-click to open and shut. Nothing else in the game can open a door, which is what makes a hut a place to be at night.
🪂 The glider — 6 leaves, 2 sticks and 2 gems. Hold it in your hand and hold Space while you are falling. You stop dropping and start flying forwards instead: a 56-block fall that costs 7 hearts takes 2 seconds without it, and with it takes 15 seconds, costs nothing, and carries you 35 blocks along. It will not lift you off the ground — you have to be falling already — which is what 🌌 The Skylands and the void under them were waiting for.
Hold Shift and you creep: less than half walking speed, and you cannot walk off the edge of a block. Walk right out to the lip, look down, and put the next block down from there. That is how you build a bridge over a drop, or a path out to a floating island, without falling off it once.
Shift used to be the run key, and it is worth far more as the one that stops you falling. To run, tap W twice and keep it held — you keep running until you let go. It cannot be Ctrl: this is a browser, and Ctrl+W closes the tab, which no web page is allowed to stop. Creeping is slower so it makes you less hungry too. On a phone the 🐾 button turns creeping on and leaves it on.
Eight planks at a crafting table. Put one down and right-click it to open it: twenty-seven slots that stay where you left them. Click a slot then another to move things, the same as your bag, and it does not matter which grid they are in. Put it all in and Take it all out do the obvious thing.
Break a chest and everything inside falls out on the floor — nothing you put away is ever lost. A chest belongs to the world it is in, so it is still there when you come back, and one world will hold 120 of them.
A day is seven and a half minutes: about four of daylight and two of proper dark, with dusk and dawn in between. The 🌙 on the bar tells you which. At night 🦎 rock snappers and 🦇 bats come out on the surface as well as underground, so a torch, a roof or a bed of your own making is worth having before the sun goes.
A cave is exactly as dark at noon as at midnight — it never had any sun in it to lose. And the worlds with a lid on them (🕳️ The Deep, 🍄 The Hollow, 🌑 The Rootways, 🌀 The Rift) have no night at all. The clock is the same clock in every world, and it is still ticking when you come back tomorrow.
There is an eleventh world, and it is not on the list of ten. You do not walk to it. Make a 🔑 rift key (2 obsidian, 6 runes, 2 gems), build a frame of obsidian — two blocks across and three high on the inside, standing up — point the key at the hole and right-click. Step in and hold still for a moment.
The Rift is purple rock, lava and mushrooms under a lid, and it is the only place ⬛ piggerite ore grows. It takes a gem pickaxe to shift, it glows so you can find it, and it is the material above gem: tools half again as fast as gem, and a full suit of armour that takes six sevenths off everything that hits you. A portal home is put down for you the moment you arrive.
Press N. Every world has five landing spots — the middle, and north, south, east and west, fourteen hundred blocks out. Each one is worked out from the world itself, so it is always real ground with room to stand on: in 🌌 The Skylands it is an island, never the void.
You also get three homes. Stand somewhere you like, press N and Set here. A home remembers which world it is in, so going to one takes you to that world as well as that spot. Move here puts it where you are standing now, and Forget it empties the slot.
🐑 Sheep wander about in The Meadow, The Dunes, The Frostfields and The Hollow, and run when you get close. Catch one and it gives you 🧶 wool — which builds like anything else, and is what a bed is made of. Three wool and three planks at a crafting table.
Put the bed down and right-click it. In daylight it makes the bed: from then on that is where you wake up when the worst happens, instead of the spot the world started you at however far away that is by now. At night you get in, and the night is over — dawn, full hearts, and whatever came out in the dark has wandered off.
Your bed remembers which world it is in, so waking up takes you back there. Break it and you are back to the old spot until you put another one down, and the game says so rather than surprising you.
Press Esc and choose 🐷 Friends, or the button on the front page. Make a world to share gives you a six-letter code; anybody you give it to types it in and lands in the same ground as you, wherever they are. You can see their pig, their name over its head, and every block they move. Press Enter to say something to them.
The shared world is the server's, not yours: your own pig, your bag and the worlds you dig on your own are never written to while you are in it. It is a little slower than sitting in the same room — about half a second for a block to cross — which is plenty for building and not enough for a sword fight. Whoever has the code can dig there, so hand it to friends rather than to the internet. On your own wifi, start-lan-server does the same job faster and without the internet at all.
Travelling plays by the same rules as 🆘: not while you are falling, not with lava within seven blocks, not while something is hurting you, and not twice in twenty seconds. Setting a home has no rules — you can do that any time.
You are not alone out there any more. 🐛 Grubs potter about in the grass and 🦇 bats flit round the caves — neither will do you any harm. 🦎 Rock snappers underground will, 👁️ ash stalkers in the hot worlds are fast and mean it, and a 🗿 stone golem is slow, has twenty-two hearts and hits harder than a long fall. Look at one and hold the mine button to swing at it; what it was carrying lands on the floor.
And then there is the ✨ truffle sprite. It is a hundred times rarer than a grub, it runs from you, and it is carrying runes and a bowl of truffle stew. Most people who play this will never see one.
Walk far enough and you will find things that were built before you arrived. 🔥 Campfires gone cold and 🏚️ ruined huts with a crafting table still standing in them are common. 🏰 Watchtowers are rarer — you can see the lantern on top from a long way off, and you can climb them. 🗄️ Vaults are sealed rooms buried deep in the rock, full of ore and with an enchanting table inside, and the only way in is to dig.
There are six 🔮 runestone shrines in the whole ten-thousand-block world. Crystal pillars, lanterns, a gold block on the top and both tables at the foot of it. Finding one is the sort of thing you tell somebody about.
The Meadow is free. After that each one opens by itself the moment you are carrying what it asks for — 8 stone for 🏜️ The Dunes, 12 coal for 🍄 The Hollow, 24 coal for 🌋 The Ashlands, 6 gems for 💠 The Crystal Caves, and so on down to 🌑 The Rootways. Press M to see the lot.
Deep down there is 🔮 runestone, and only a gem pickaxe will shift it. It gives you ✨ runes. Build an enchanting table out of obsidian, runes and gems, stand next to it, press R, and spend them. There are thirteen: ⚡ mine faster, 🍀 get double drops, 🪶 fall softer, 🍖 stay full longer, 🔦 glow in the dark, 🧲 reach further, ⚔️ hit harder, 🦘 jump higher, 🌀 pull dropped blocks to you, 🧊 burn more slowly in lava, 🐬 swim properly, 🌱 grow berries sooner — and 🛡️ Protection. Most go to three levels; Swimmer goes to two and Protection to four.
🛡️ Protection is worth a whole piece of armour a level and it stacks on top of what you are wearing, so a full suit of ⬛ piggerite with Protection IV is the most anything can ever be softened: a ten-heart knock comes through as one. Nothing takes all of it.
Ten thousand blocks across and ten thousand back — you could walk for an hour and not reach the edge. Straight down, 🪨 bedrock is at y −58 and nothing grows above y 125, which is the top of the tallest mountains. Mountains are rare: most of the land rolls about the sea, and a range worth climbing is something you go looking for.
A long fall hurts, so do not dig straight down without looking.
Straight down from overhead, one block a pixel. 🟡 is a home of yours, 🩷 is you and the way you are looking. It shows the ground the game is holding — walk, and more of it appears.
Click a slot, then click another one, and the two swap — the same as your bag. It does not matter which grid they are in. Point at a slot and press Q to throw one thing out, or Ctrl+Q for the whole stack.
One world, and both of you standing in it. Make a world to share and tell your friend its code, or type in the code they gave you. They do not need anything installed — the same page, the same code, and you are in the same ground.
THE CODE FOR THIS WORLD
------
Every code this computer has been in. They stay on the server — making a new one never takes an old one away. Click one to go back.
What is shared: the world, its seed, and every block anybody changes — in all eleven worlds, so you can go through the portal together. What is not: your bag. A shared world is its own game: you walk in with nothing and dig your way up in there, and what you carry in it stays in it. Your own pig, bag, tools and worlds are not touched, and are waiting for you the moment you leave.
Two people can play on one computer, in two windows — each window is its own pig with its own bag.
It is slower than sitting in the same room: a block your friend puts down takes about half a second to reach you, and the pigs move in small steps. For building together that is plenty. Whoever has the code can dig here, so give it to friends and not to the internet.
Once you are in a shared world there is a 🎤 Talk button beside the chat. Press it and you can hear each other; press it again and your microphone is off. It stays off until you press it — nobody can listen to you, or be heard by you, before that. 🔊 Mic lets you listen without speaking. The sound goes straight from your computer to your friend's and is never recorded anywhere. Anyone who has the room code can hear you, so — as with the code itself — share it with friends and not with the internet, and ask a grown-up first.
A coat for your pig. Click one in your bag, then click this slot. Click it again to take it off.
Nine slots. It fills them itself when it is fetching logs, and empties them when it is filling in holes. Point at a slot and press Q to throw one thing out, or Ctrl+Q for the whole stack.
Every pig in the village swaps different things, and always the same three. Walk round the houses and see who has what.
Somewhere to go, and somewhere to come back to. Both travel under the 🆘 rules: not while you are falling, not with lava close by, not while something is hurting you, and not twice in twenty seconds.
Three of them. Stand where you want one and press Set here. A home remembers which world it is in, so going to it takes you there.
Five places in this world, worked out from the world itself — each one is real ground with room to stand on it.
Click one thing and then another to swap them round.
Throwing things out: point at a slot and press Q for one, or Ctrl+Q for the whole stack. (Shift+Q does the same, in case your browser wants Ctrl+Q for itself.) It works the same in a chest and in your pig's bag. Out in the world, Q throws whatever is in your hand. Everything you throw lands in front of you, and you can walk back over it to pick it up again.
Runes come out of 🔮 runestone, and nothing but a 💎 gem pickaxe will shift it. Three levels each, costing 3, then 6, then 9.
build v6.0