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

Details

External ID
47195258
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
RTS with known stars and exoplanets can now be played in the browser
Website domain
stardustexile.com
Launched
Feb. 28, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
6
Upvotes percentile
0.28099730458221023
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

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

Enrichment

Theme
interactive simulations and creative experiments
Vertical
Media & entertainment
Function
—
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
real-time strategy game with real stars and exoplanets
Manually corrected
False

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

No comments on this launch.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 105 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #91 of 106 (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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