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Termcraft

Terminal-first 2D sandbox survival in Rust

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I’ve been building termcraft, a terminal-first 2D sandbox survival game in Rust.The idea is to take the classic early survival progression and adapt it to a side-on terminal format instead of a tile or pixel-art engine.Current build includes: - procedural Overworld, Nether, and End generation - mining, placement, crafting, furnaces, brewing, and boats - hostile and passive mobs - villages, dungeons, strongholds, Nether fortresses, and dragon progressionThis is still early alpha, but it’s already playable.Project: https://github.com/pagel-s/termcraftDocs: https://pagel-s.github.io/termcraft/Demo: https://youtu.be/kR986Xqzj7E

HN · launched Mar 21, 2026 · 136 upvotes (top 7%) · 0 views

Niche: terminal and arcade games · 42 launches, 3 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 42 launches in terminal and arcade games →

Could you build this?

Partial A basic terminal text interface is straightforward, but building a full 2D sandbox survival game in Rust with procedural multi-dimension terrain generation and complex game physics requires non-trivial systems programming.

What it would actually take: Built in Rust using terminal manipulation libraries like `ratatui` or `crossterm`. The complex parts involve real-time terminal game loops, ANSI/Unicode rendering optimization to prevent flickering, and fast procedural generation algorithms (Perlin/Simplex noise, cellular automata) for infinitely expanding 2D world dimensions.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Roguelike games (text-based predecessors), Atari Gauntlet, Minecraft, Terraria, Hytale

Concerns raised: Player character visibility/motion hard to see, 2D world makes nether fortress progression tedious and unskippable, Rust language choice may hinder developer velocity in gamedev

Feature requests: Play over SSH without local compilation, Link instances together for import/export of resources, Extended ASCII or Unicode characters for player representation, Multiplayer/networked gameplay

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 198 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #14 of 199 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 143 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.