Sapper - Minesweeper Minigame for RPG Maker MZ: Clear a Field Over Your Picture, No Guessing

Clear the field, uncover the picture.

Sapper is a Minesweeper minigame for RPG Maker MZ. Name any picture in your project and the plugin lays a minefield over that picture: turf, sand, snow or slate, each cell tinted from the picture beneath it, so the field hints at what it hides. Every cell the player clears uncovers that patch of the picture, and a number says how many mines touch it. Clear every safe cell and the rest of the field lifts away: the picture is shown whole.

No guessing. Every field is laid after the first click, away from it, and laid again until a logic solver can finish it from there. A careful player never has to guess, and no game ends on a coin flip.

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⚠️ Compatibility — the question you actually have

Tested against RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified, verified by running the plugin in the real engine rather than only in tests.

Plugin Manager order:

1. SapperCore.js — Sapper 1/3 - the rules: a minefield laid over your picture, every board solvable without a guess. No engine code.
2. SapperDraw.js — Sapper 2/3 - the look: the minefield drawn as turf, sand, snow or slate in your picture's colours, the marks, the frame. No engine code.
3. Sapper.js — Sapper 3/3 - Minesweeper over one of your pictures: clear the field to uncover it. Every board solvable without a guess.

Core methods extended — 2 by saved-original prototype extension, none replaced: Game_System.prototype.initialize, Game_Interpreter.prototype.updateWaitMode.

Because nothing is clobbered, Sapper co-exists with other plugins that patch the same seams, including large suites.

What is in it

• Any picture, four grounds: turf with tufted grass, sand with wind ripples, snow with drifts, slate with cleavage lines, each tinted from your picture.
• Three fields: small 9 x 7 (9 mines), medium 12 x 9 (17), large 16 x 12 (32), or your own mine count up to 30% of the field. The first click always opens ground and never more than 60% of it.
• Real deduction: measured over 1,000 fields per size, about half the small and medium fields and two thirds of the large ones need more than reading one number at a time.
• Mines as your monsters: draw the mines as iron, or as the enemies of any troop in your database pressed into wax seals.
• Lives: from one mine and done to nine.
• Results go back into your game: seconds taken, mines set off, flags planted and percent cleared into your variables, and a switch that says whether the field was cleared. The event waits while the game is on screen.
• Mouse, touch, keyboard and pad: click to clear, right click to flag, click a satisfied number to clear around it; tap and long press on touch; arrows, OK and Shift on a pad.
• Any screen size: laid out for 816 x 624 and scaled to fit, tested at 1280 x 720, 1104 x 624 and 640 x 480.

Measured, not promised

• On the large field with a cell cleared every 6 frames, the scene draws in 5 draw calls per frame with no MZ window drawn; a cell is redrawn only when it is cleared or flagged.
• Your picture is read once when a game starts and never during play.
• Tested in the real MZ engine: any load order, a missing sibling file, a missing picture, a 1 x 1 picture, a 4000 x 3000 picture, a fully transparent picture, every ground on every field size played to a clear, and input spam.

Install

Copy the three files into js/plugins, turn them on in the Plugin Manager, and call the plugin command Start Sapper with a picture. The Readme in the download covers every argument, the script call and the save record.

More from Core Systems Asset Factory

• Leadlight: the same prize with another verb, a brick-breaker whose bricks are a stained-glass pane cut from your picture.
• Unveil: a territory-capture minigame that reveals one of your pictures piece by piece.
• Jigsaw: any picture in your project cut into a generated jigsaw, every cut a real knob-and-socket curve.
• Pendant: spot the difference on any picture, with the differences generated by the plugin.

AI disclosure: the code was written with AI assistance, and the store images and cover were produced with AI assistance. The plugin contains no audio; its default sounds are files from RPG Maker MZ's own RTP.