New Altcoin help

Hi everyone, I am working on a zcash altcoin as a college project and I am running into issues while trying to mine the first block. I have mined the genesis block and got two nodes connected to each other, but once the connection is found it does not start mining any blocks. For some reason it shows that is attempting to download ~2147483640 blocks and since none of the blocks are being downloaded it I am stuck in a loop where I cannot mine. I have ensured that all zcash seeds have been removed from the code. Any help would be much appreciated.

:thinking::face_with_raised_eyebrow: