Microlandia, a brutally honest city builder
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It all started as an experiment to see if I could build a game making heavy use of Deno and its SQLite driver. After sharing an early build in the „What are you working on?“ thread here, I got the encouragement I needed to polish it and make a version 1.0 for Steam.So here it is, Microlandia, a SimCity Classic-inspired game with parameters from real-life datasets, statistics and research. It also introduces aspects that are conveniently hidden in other games (like homelessness), and my plan is to continue updating, expanding and perfecting the models for an indefinite amount of time.
HN · launched Dec 3, 2025 · 144 upvotes (top 7%) · 1 view
Niche: management and simulation games · 82 launches, 5 in the last 7 days ▼ -58% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 82 launches in management and simulation games →
Could you build this?
Partial While the Deno and SQLite setup is straightforward, creating an individual-agent socioeconomic city simulation that runs smoothly at scale requires complex systems modeling and performance tuning beyond simple AI prompts.
What it would actually take: Requires an architecture pairing an ECS (Entity Component System) or relational in-memory database with a game frontend (Pixi.js, Phaser, or Godot via WebAssembly). The primary difficulty lies in balancing complex macroeconomic equations, individual agent pathfinding/state machines, and maintaining 60 FPS while running thousands of discrete agent updates per tick.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Sim City, Urbek City Builder, Cities 2, Caesar III
Concerns raised: Linux and Steam Deck performance issues (texture loading, controls), Steam key not received with itch.io purchase, Data types and simulation parameters changing too fast for modding, Workers not attracted to factories and farms, Incomplete early access build on itch.io
Feature requests: Ability to see buses drive around after implementing public transport, Different types of lanes (bike-priority, bus-priority, highways), Custom building support with JSON configuration and voxel files, Modding API with sandboxing for custom simulations and entity types, LLM integration to manage cities as AI mayor
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 308 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #27 of 309 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 35 days after the earliest competitor.
- MicroState · hn · 2026-01-21 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- I Built a Retro Survival RPG in Vanilla JavaScript · hn · 2026-05-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- AI agents play SimCity through a REST API · hn · 2026-02-09 · 216 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Microcosm Industries · hn · 2026-07-10 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- 2d platformer game built with Codex (zero code) · hn · 2026-02-16 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- TapToyPia · hn · 2026-05-24 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Cellarium: A Playground for Cellular Automata · hn · 2026-02-21 · 41 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- A modern low-poly SimCity 2000 clone, built by Opus 5.5 · hn · 2026-10-06 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.47
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