I created a Mars colony RPG based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books
Details
- External ID
- 46936237
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I created a Mars colony RPG based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books
- Website domain
- underhillgame.com
- Launched
- Feb. 8, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 307
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9757412398921833
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I built a desktop Mars colony survival game called Underhill, in homage to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Land on Mars, build solar panels and greenhouses, and try not to pass out during dust storms. Eventually your colonists split into factions: Greens who want to terraform and Reds who want to preserve Mars.There’s Chill Mode for players that just want to build & hang, and Conflict Mode that introduces the Red v. Green factions. Reds sabotage, the terrain slowly turns green as the world gets more terraformed.Feedback welcome, especially on performance and gameplay!
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
- mars colony rpg game
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes Building a 2D grid-based colony sim game with survival mechanics and narrative factions can be implemented entirely in a standard browser engine (Phaser, Canvas, or React) with AI assistance.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Performance issues (3-4 FPS lag on desktop), Game only allows daytime play, not sleeping during day, Industrial process heat and dense urban centers difficult to power with solar
Feature requests: Ability to sleep during daytime hours
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 67 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 68 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 93 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.