Infinite Craft is a browser game with a simple premise. You begin with four elements – water, fire, wind, and earth – and combine two of them to make a new element. Water and fire make steam, steam and fire make an engine, steam and engine make a train. Before you know it, your bloodshot eyes behold a web of nebulas, political crises, philosophical concepts, and volcanoes (so many volcanoes!) sprawling across a conspiracy map that would make Charlie Kelly blush. But how did one man possibly prepare for all these combinations? Well, behind the curtains of Infinite Craft, an AI synthesises connections between your chosen elements and adds them to a global database. It's a game made by one man, informed by billions of minds, yet powered by no one at all.

Amid rampant games industry layoffs, AI art in Square Enix games, and AI voice acting in The Finals, the thought of gamifying AI itself might rightly send a sensible shiver down your spine. But I think Neal Agarwal, a 26-year-old developer based in New York, deserves an open mind. Soft-spoken and musing with interest in my line of work, Agarwal radiates the airy thoughtfulness of someone you'd expect behind a game like Infinite Craft. With his broader body of work in view, it all makes even more sense. From vast visualisations of the deep sea to interactive trolley problems with increasingly absurd dilemmas, his website Neal.fun is an eclectic springboard of curiosity. If any project embodies him best, it's Internet Artifacts: a massive internet history museum whose interactive exhibits include '80s Usenet terminals, emulated browsers, and playable Flash games. Neal.fun is a tactile toybox, one so relentlessly jumbled that it almost eludes theme. I say almost, because beneath the miscellany lies an obsession with scale, new technologies, and nostalgia for a more playful chapter of the internet.

Infinite Craft feels like the final boss of Neal.fun. A playful repurposing of today's tech preoccupation, it draws its endless connections from the bottomless well of the internet. It's also his biggest and costliest project yet. "Last month was the most money I've ever spent in my life," he tells me with a winded smile. By licensing Meta's generative AI Llama 2 to produce the elements and connections, plus separate server hosting costs via TogetherAI, Infinite Craft racks up quite the maintenance bill. "It's breaking even now, so that's nice. It's not making money, but at least it's not losing any."

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Since its launch, Infinite Craft has taken the world by storm with the near-infinite amount of combinations you can make. With that, plenty of combinations that were beyond my wildest dreams were suddenly being generated before my eyes, so I figured it would be best to compile those that struck me the most.

10. Radioactive Kanye West

“What was I doing combining Chernobyl and Kanye West?” you might ask. The answer isn’t quite as simple as the results, but it expanded my horizons and showed me that you can do quite a bit with only a little in Infinite Craft. Getting Kanye West was the hard part, mainly because I can’t remember how I got my way to Kardashian. However, getting the string of “Divorce, Husband and Marriage” meant I could pull the rapper from the weeds of wherever he hangs out nowadays.

If you’ve been spending as much time as we have with Infinite Craft, you probably didn’t notice Neal.fun has other games to play. In fact, some may be just as entertaining and addicting. After much debate, we’ve ranked the top 10 best games on Neal.fun!

10. Ambient Chaos

Ambient Chaos is less of a traditional game and more of a fun tool to mess around with, especially if you’re into sound mixing. It features 30 unique sounds that you can toggle at will, and even adjust the volume for each one. I can see it as a useful tool for filling the silence with the soothing sounds of the waves while you work.

What are all the Infinite Craft recipes and combos? We've been addictively playing this since we learned about it, and as a result, there are hundreds of combinations and recipes now known. Here's our guide on all of them, including some of the most obscure suggestions.

Infinite Craft is a browser game that's recently been taking the web by storm, with endless possibilities and some that'll give you quite a giggle. Think of it as a puzzle game by ways of god; it's a great game to open if you want to while away an hour or two figuring out all of the combinations.

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