UPDATE: Satlantis has announced that the Bitcoin play-to-earn functionality will be removed from its Minecraft server on September 25 following a demand from Minecraft creator Mojang. The feature violates the game's recently updated usage guidelines. Read the full report. The following guide will no longer be accurate as of that date.

ORIGINAL STORY: Did you know you can earn Bitcoin by playing Minecraft? 

Satlantis, a Minecraft server, lets users earn Bitcoin while they play. Players can enter a virtual mining pool that pays out real satoshis (sats) to players every 10 minutes.

A satoshi is the smallest unit of measurement for Bitcoin, with each Bitcoin containing 100 million satoshis. According to Zebedee, which created the tech to power the third-party server, over 1 million satoshis (nearly $300) is given out every week.

How do you get involved? How does it work? And how much can you really earn? We spent numerous hours in-game to help you get started—both in text and via the video walkthrough below.

How do you earn Bitcoin in Minecraft?

Satlantis is a Minecraft server that is accessible via Minecraft: Java Edition on computers. The server IP is play.satlantis.net.

Anyone can hop onto Satlantis and play, but to earn Bitcoin, you must get a virtual ASIC miner—the type of miner needed to mine Bitcoin in real life, too—and then fuel it with emeralds. This will increase your hashrate (seen on the right side of the screen), which will then enter you into a raffle every 10 minutes to win a sliver of Bitcoin.

The lowest-tier ASIC miner adds 10 to your hashrate, but you can get an ASIC miner that produces up to 45 hashrate for you. 

To calculate your chances of winning, divide your hashrate by the global hashrate shown on-screen, and then multiply by 100. During our short time playing, we managed to get a maximum of 30 hashrate with a global hashrate of 52,630. This means that we had a 0.057% chance of winning Bitcoin, every 10 minutes.

You can also join a clan to combine your hashrate with the other members. This improves your chances at winning more consistently, with the earnings being split between members based on how much they contributed to the group's hashrate.

While ASIC miners are the primary way of earning sats in-game, you can also trade your way to some Bitcoin. There is a marketplace available where users will sell items as menial as dirt or as rare as elytras—this is where we got our ASIC miners!

Don't get fooled by the marketplace price tags, though! What looks like $2,000 actually means 2,000 sats—which is currently just over $0.50.

How do I get an ASIC miner in Satlantis?

There are two ways to get ASIC miners in Satlantis: through the battle pass or the marketplace.

The battle pass, which you can access by typing “/bp” into the in-game chat, is available on free and paid tiers. In season 3, the current season as of this writing, you have to get to level 51 on the free battle pass before you get an "Elliptic Key," which allows you to get an ASIC miner via an "Elliptic Crate.”

If 51 tiers of a free battle pass seems a bit too intense for you, the premium battle pass gives you an Elliptic Key at level 10. A premium battle pass costs $40 via Stripe, or 120,000 satoshis—approximately $33 as of this writing.

In order to level up the battle pass, you really have to actively work at it—your quests are rarely completed as a byproduct of playing normally. There are fun quests, such as a "Where's Waldo?" task where you must find Waldo hidden somewhere in the world. But there are also more grindy quests, like "Deal 10,000 points of damage to a player.”

After playing for a while, we decided to cut this corner and buy some ASIC miners directly from the marketplace.

First we had to get money onto Satlantis. This is done by typing “/deposit” and sending Bitcoin via the Lightning Network to the address shown on-screen via a QR code. We loaded on $9, which gave us 32,999 SATs, and bought three virtual ASIC s10 miners for 29,000 SATs.

How do you fuel the ASICs?

In order for your ASIC miner to produce a hashrate, it must be fueled with an emerald. You do not need to be logged on to produce hashrate or collect rewards, so the game can run in the background while you're doing other stuff on your PC.

The maximum amount of emeralds you can put in an ASIC miner is 64 per fuel slot. This only increases the amount of time that your ASIC miner will produce hashrate—this was 18 hours, three minutes, and 20 seconds for our s10 miner.

It's important to note that you do not obtain emeralds the same way you would in vanilla Minecraft. Instead, there are traders in the lobby that will exchange ores and sugar cane for emeralds.

With exchange rates like 32 diamonds for 16 emeralds, you'll be forgiven for thinking that securing stacks of 64 emeralds is unattainable. But you'd be wrong.

By entering “/mines” in the chat, you'll be teleported to a crazy mine system with an abundance of every ore you'll need. In these mines, I managed to get two stacks of 64 diamonds within 20 minutes. 

You can take things to the next level by entering the diamond mines. To get there. you must complete an incredibly challenging parkour course. If you want to make things easier for yourself, then purchase an elytra (a set of wings) and fly down—we eventually did this.

Once down there, you'll find lots of mushrooms (great to make mushroom soup), mobs (aka enemy creatures, to complete quests), and Poseidon's tomb.

In this tomb, there's an incredible amount of ores to mine. It can be slightly overwhelming when you first enter, but it’s not all smooth sailing as you'll have to defend yourself against mobs.

How much can you earn?

Over four days of sporadically playing on the Satlantis server, we managed to keep our three ASIC s10 miners running for about 41 hours in total. 

For the vast majority of that span, we’d earned zero Bitcoin. We were onto our last hour of fuel with the game running in the background when suddenly we won the raffle.

We earned 16,034 sats during our time on the server. This is just over $4 as of this writing, meaning we are nearly halfway to earning our initial investment back.

How do you withdraw Bitcoin from Satlantis?

Once you're ready to cash out, simply type “/withdraw” followed by the amount you want to withdraw. Next, you'll be asked to enter your Lightning Network address. Once you've done this, you’ll need to wait up to 48 hours for the transaction to process.

The Satlantis server is an intriguing way for gamers to earn Bitcoin while playing one of the most popular games of all time. It can be difficult to get started, but the guide above should help you get your bearings—and don’t hesitate to ask questions in the server’s Discord or in-game chat, as the community appears to be very supportive of newcomers.

Editor's note: This story was updated after publication to add detail on how clans work in Satlantis.