Termcraft
Terminal-first 2D sandbox survival in Rust
Details
- External ID
- 47469949
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Termcraft
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- March 21, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 136
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9341943419434194
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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
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
- terminal-based survival game
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 100 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #7 of 101 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 143 days after the earliest competitor.
- I Built a Retro Survival RPG in Vanilla JavaScript · hn · 2026-05-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Afterburner · hn · 2026-06-14 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Horizon · hn · 2026-03-17 · 84 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Mars Sandbox · ph · 2026-09-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Hurry · hn · 2025-12-22 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- termdeck · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Godot and Rust based multiplexer (terminal panes and more) · hn · 2026-09-11 · 97 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Minimal container-like sandbox built from scratch in C · hn · 2025-12-07 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.