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RTS with known stars and exoplanets can now be played in the browser

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Hi HN,I'm a solo dev working on a space RTS game set in the Milky Way galaxy, containing currently known stars and exoplanets with their real characteristics, the remaining stars are procedurally generated.In the online mode, all players are in the same universe, and the world is persistent. You compete with other players to take back the Solar System and end your exile. Players can always retreat to the periphery to regain strength and rebuild their fleets as needed.It also includes an procedural spaceship generator that allows creating your own spaceship designs. Spaceships visuals don't change their stats. This way players won't have to use spaceships they don't like due to superior stats.Spaceships keep operating even when the player is offline: production spaceships keep harvesting resources, and combat spaceships automatically engage invading spaceships. To allow players to mount proper defenses against large attacks, they can build disruptors to slow down travel from enemies to their systems for up to 24 hours.Now it can be played in the browser:https://stardustexile.com

HN · launched Feb 28, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 72%) · 0 views

Niche: browser-based video games · 380 launches, 21 in the last 7 days ▼ -28% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Media & entertainment
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No A persistent massively multiplayer space RTS with astronomical datasets, procedural generation, and real-time netcode in the browser is a massive technical endeavor far beyond AI vibe coding.

What it would actually take: The stack consists of a WebGL/WebGPU engine (e.g. custom engine or BabylonJS/Three.js) compiled with WebAssembly, connected to an authoritative distributed gameserver cluster (C++ or Rust) using WebSockets/WebRTC. Hard parts include spatial partitioning for millions of celestial bodies, deterministic lockstep or client-side prediction netcode for MMO scales, and planetary procedural generation shaders. It requires a seasoned game engine developer and MMO infrastructure engineer.

Discussion

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Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 219 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #192 of 220 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 113 days after the earliest competitor.

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