About
Diggers is a puzzle/strategy game originally released for the Amiga CD32 (bundled with Oscar) and later ported to the Amiga 1200 and DOS. Players guide a five-miner team from one of four races to mine valuable minerals across 34 regions of the planet Zarg while competing against AI-controlled rival races; a sequel, Diggers 2: Extractors, was released for DOS in 1995. This is a fan remake of Diggers for Windows, macOS, and Linux, developed by Mhat of Mhatxotic Design using the developer's own cross-platform Mhatxotic Engine and open-source libraries. It reproduces the original's core structure — four playable races, 34 regions, the Zargon Stock Exchange — and is playable from start to finish, with active single-developer maintenance ongoing.
How it differs from the original
The remake makes enhancements to the original's mechanics, level design, and game balance, and modernizes rendering, audio, input handling, and build systems, adding configurable controls, higher-resolution assets where available, cross-platform input backends, and game-controller support not present in the 1990s originals.
Getting started
On Windows, the included executable can simply be double-clicked to run; on Linux, it requires installing the libglfw3 package and running the diggers.elf binary; on macOS, the disk image's quarantine flag needs to be removed via Terminal before it will open. The game can be played with just the mouse, or mouse plus keyboard for easier control, and pressing F1 at any time opens the in-game setup screen.
History
The remake originated in 2006 as a Win32 C build using DirectDraw and DirectSound, and was later rewritten from scratch in modern C++ using the developer's own engine and open-source, cross-platform libraries.
Known limitations
- graphics: Original textures had to be updated to be compatible with OpenGL; users are invited to upgrade textures up to 16x scale.
- compatibility: Linux version compatibility with non-Ubuntu distributions is unknown.
Additional notes
- Modding
- Textures can be overridden by adding scaled replacement images (up to 16x the original resolution) packaged into non-solid 7-zip archives placed alongside the executable.