Diamond Hunt

Diamond Hunt was the incremental game that refused to stay a single-player spreadsheet. Starting life in 2014 as an offline clicker by a developer known as ick, it grew into an online, MMORPG-flavoured world where your mining levels mattered to other people, then spawned sequel after sequel before going quiet. Four games, a mobile app and a successor later, it remains one of the clearest examples of what happens when RuneScape thinking meets the idle genre.

What the loop feels like

You begin with a pickaxe and a plot. Ore gets mined, ore gets sold, and the proceeds buy the first real decision: more miners, or the crafting bench that turns raw material into gear. Farming feeds the brewing still, brewing feeds the expeditions, and exploring sends you out against mobs that fight back on a ticking clock. Nothing here is a single number climbing. Every skill leans on another, so the game always has one thread pulling at your attention. That's Diamond Hunt.

Then the automation arrives and the balancing act begins. Advanced drills chew through oil faster than your wells refill them, so switching on one drill too many stalls the entire mining line while you scramble to correct the ratio. You check the combat tick, top up a healing potion, queue another brew, and glance at the market to see what other players are selling. The game never quite runs itself, and that friction is the point. That's Diamond Hunt.

The systems that did the work

The original release organised everything into distinct skills: Mining, Crafting, Farming, Brewing and Exploring, with Magic and Cooking added later, all governed by a global level cap of 500. Brewing worked as the mid-to-late game accelerator, letting you graduate from consumable stat boosters to grinding for infinite-use combat and utility potions. Combat ran on an active, tick-based rhythm where gear choices, elemental weaknesses, spellcasting and manual healing decided survival against bosses like the Ent and the Fire Snake. And at a global level milestone of 30, non-hardcore accounts unlocked the Player Market, which turned a solitary grind into a trade-enabled economy with real people on the other side of every sale.

Where it stumbles

The honest critiques were structural. Progress crawled: hitting high levels demanded enormous passive time or hyper-optimised loops, and some players found early skills barely rewarding enough to bother. The presentation aged poorly, with stretched pixel assets, clunky menus and rudimentary palettes. Worst of all was the fragmentation: ick kept starting fresh projects, Diamond Hunt 1, 2 and 3 plus a mobile app, and older versions felt abandoned, with saves stranded on servers that went dark. Combat, too, stayed shallow, mostly a matter of clicking to heal and farming specific drops.

Playing it today

The original servers are offline. diamondhunt.co now redirects to an Idle Pixel status page listing Diamond Hunt 1, 2 and 3 as offline, with a note that they may return eventually. Two relics remain playable: Diamond Hunt Offline preserves the 2014 single-player original, and the Diamondhunt App keeps the mobile iteration up. The developer's current focus is Idle Pixel, the live successor that carries the same skill-and-grind DNA forward, and we cover it separately in Idle Pixel Legends.

The verdict

As a live game, Diamond Hunt is gone, and no retrospective should pretend otherwise. As a piece of idle genre history, it deserves the record: it proved that browser incrementals could carry a persistent economy, that skill-based progression could make an idle game feel like an MMO, and that a tiny community could hold a whole genre experiment together. The successor is where the story continues, but the series that started it earned its nostalgia the slow way, one mining tick at a time.