Show HN: A terminal-native idle factory game, written in Rust with ratatui (gitlab.com)
125 points by snipedbywifi 10 hours ago
Hey HN readers!
I'm snipedbywifi (https://gitlab.com/snipedbywifi), and i've been working on terminactory. Please try it out if you'd like to play a cozy factory game while waiting for long agent tasks to finish!
The game is a factory game (overused niche, i know xD), but runs in your terminal. Reason i built it? glad you asked: So basically, it started off with me wanting a terminal-native factory game. Me and the modern 5.5 claude models made a base for the game that I liked, and then i went ham adding features / fixing some minor flaws (like adding claude code hooks so you recieve "telegrams" [the agent's responses], so you can review progress directly in-game). (yes, I had heavy AI assistance, disclaimer!!!)
Right now, the game has basic factory features you'd expect from a game like this (build stuff, delete stuff, measure how much you're earning, basic selection tools), along with a few more.. "unexpected" features. This includes a fake in-game browser that has a wiki, fake forums, some fun bits of lore, some more lore, a LOT more lore, and a research graph that shows how many items or how much RP (research points) you'd need to unlock something, and some more QOL features.
If anyone actually has this issue / want of a terminal-based game that runs alongside your agents so you don't doomscroll, do you have any suggestions, or additional ideas I could add?
It's hosted on GitLab, soo, that's one additional thing i'd like to mention
Thanks for reading!! snipedbywifi
(p.s. first HN post lol) (p.s. p.s. there's a lot of hidden lore in the game, so.. lore-divers? you might like it?)
Joker_vD 8 hours ago
> It is made to sit in a split next to your AI agents. They can send you short messages that show up in the game, so you can play while they work.
> Agent messages
> Your AI agents can message you inside the game. A message costs the agent only the words in it, and nothing prints on success. Messages wait while the game is closed.
It's kinda amazing how the ancient "local mail" technology keeps getting reinvented, you know, and reintegrated inside the gameplay? NetHack had its its "mail demon" since... (googles) version 1.0.2, in April 1985 — the creature would spawn in the game, deliver you a scroll of mail, and vanish. And apparently, it's still in use nowadays? "On public servers such as nethack.alt.org, a user may observe other users' games and communicate with them by sending mail."
neuronexmachina 7 hours ago
I guess it's a variation on jwz's old aphorism:
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
snipedbywifi 8 hours ago
wow, i didn't know about NetHack, that's pretty damn cool!
and yeah, genuinely insane how we came full-circle lol... on terminactory it uses claude code hooks, with an optional "tfac msg" command (tried to minimize token usage, hence the hook)
but yeah, the netHack thing is pretty cool, guess you learn something new every day? xD
george_max 6 hours ago
It's an interesting game, I love the hacker-like look to it. But is the only value proposition here that it runs in a terminal?
To me, it could be interesting for ~10 minutes, and I'd then prefer playing a game like Factorio.
elxr an hour ago
Comparing a small TUI open-source game to Factorio?
Those aren't competitors.
snipedbywifi 6 hours ago
that's a good point, actually. the features that differentiate terminactory from.. say, factorio, is the agent telegrams, the lore behind the game (optional, it's a factory game, with a lot to discover story-wise, in-game), and some other QOL features ("blueprint" that let you copy paste sections, with mirroring and rotating, unlockable on the early game; selecting a large area and deleting it, and a few more)
of course, it's not objectively better than any game, but there are a few separating qualities from the average popular factory game xD
picture 4 hours ago
Blueprints with those features are a major feature of Factorio.
snipedbywifi 6 hours ago
sorry for the blatant autocorrect artifacts, typing on my phone rn :/
ivanjermakov 5 hours ago
Why every factory game is about mining/smelting iron and copper? Aren't there more intersting industrial processes?
snipedbywifi 5 hours ago
There are, but I was trying to make the game for a more general audience. I'd be willing to add another game model with more realism, and some more processes too, if you'd be interested. I just don't see much appeal for such games.. If it's liked substantially by a few people, I'll add it as a gamemode, otherwise it feels like catering to a non-existent crowd :/
but, now that you mention it, I'll look into adding it soon, thanks!
felixg3 2 hours ago
I’m currently vibe-coding a game for myself inspired by prison architect + workers & resources - it’s about a fictional 1940s-1980s Soviet plutonium production complex where you have to manage… workers, resources, political goodwill, quotas, and accidents. Modelled are Alpha, Beta, gamma and Neutron radiation, effects on workers like in rimworld.
Will be gpl 3.0 and I plan to release a playable 0.1 on GitHub. I care mostly about historical accuracy of radiation incidents and factory issues at the intersection of nuclear engineering & political issues akin to Paper’s please.
I’m afraid to publish it because I despise the amount of AI slop out there. I just want to tickle my need for a historical plutonium production management simulator.
wongarsu 8 hours ago
Reminds me of Dwarf Fortress's original ASCII UI
snipedbywifi 8 hours ago
well, that is an INSANE amount of praise, thank you so much! but yes, the ASCII art was inspired by Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm, and a few other games :D
Filligree 7 hours ago
Arguably it might not be. :p
That was CP437 squeezed into a terminal emulator that ran sixteen or so OpenGL calls per character. I spent a couple months building a shim library to optimise it, before Toady let me fix the game. :p
Real terminal output ought to be faster, but don’t sleep on Kitty.
chaz6 8 hours ago
Nice! I wonder if you could have an option to use the icons available in Nerd Fonts in addition to plain ascii?
snipedbywifi 8 hours ago
that sounds doable, i'll add it as an opt-in for the next batch of changes. thanks for the idea!
tough 7 hours ago
wonder if you could turn a custom fond into map pieces
yoyohello13 7 hours ago
Pretty neat looking! I'll need to try it out on Monday ;)
snipedbywifi 7 hours ago
i hope you enjoy it! it'll be an excellent monday, that's for sure ;)
nickpsecurity 5 hours ago
If it runs fast and low resource, it could be a nice testbed for agent architectures. I'm thinking old-school planners, genetic programming, ML techniques, etc.
Especially integrating planners or logic-based approaches with ML models. The old architectures for StarCraft were great at building and micro-managing units but terrible at assessing or adapting to enemy strategy. Hybrid architectures can address that.
Games like yours, esp different styles or requirements, can be used to prove how well the techniques generalize.
snipedbywifi 5 hours ago
that's a good idea, I could definitely see this and games like this as agent benchmarks, like an ARC-AGI but it rotates amongst strategy / long-horizon sandbox games, so we don't have benchmaxxing..
It's a good direction though, I'll take this into consideration in future versions :D