Nicheloom visits: 58,050 all-time · 7,694 in the last 7 days

The opportunity tracker for new startups.

Today: 1,953 launches · Niche of the day: specialized calculation tools · See what launched today →

A self-running space economy SIM in Rust and Bevy

Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.

Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.

I built this with Claude cause I always wanted to tinker with a simulation economoy and I love space themes.A space-economy sim where nothing is scripted. A few hundred autonomous ships each run their own planner. Some chase the best trade route, take a delivery contract, refuel, retrofit at a shipyard, or dock so the crew can rest before morale tanks.Markets price everything off supply with shortage-urgency multipliers, factions tax and subsidize, populations migrate when they're unhappy, and stations that go broke get abandoned and rot.It started as an Elixir/Phoenix prototype, but the BEAM scheduler struggled on Windows gaming PCs, so I had Claude rewrite the engine in Rust.The sim core is pure, synchronous, IO-free (its own hecs ECS), and the Bevy client embeds it directly as a library, sim and renderer share one world with zero marshalling. Ship AI is a GOAP planner over a world state; ships replan mid-flight when a better option appears. ~485 agents today at p50 ~10-20ms/tick, architected to push toward 100k+. Single native binary, bundled SQLite, no runtime deps. Getting into 100k has been a struggle, but I have pushed it into the thousand and it was running fine.It's a sandbox, not a game yet, there's no objective yet, and I'm not actively pushing it toward "shippable." Anyone can fork it and take it over. Or it can stay as some type of AI slop, but part of me thinks it is already in a pretty good shape for a simulation use for various games or ideas.(Full disclosure: a lot of this was built pairing with Claude. That's how I had the bandwidth to take it this far. Happy to talk about what that workflow actually looked like.)

HN · launched Jul 21, 2026 · 110 upvotes (top 7%) · 0 views

Niche: management and simulation games · 82 launches, 5 in the last 7 days ▼ -58% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

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

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes The author explicitly states they vibe-coded this simulation in Rust and Bevy with Claude, implementing agent utility scoring and trade/refuel state loops.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Godot, Fyrox, Three.js, EVE Online, Escape Velocity series

Concerns raised: Claude struggles to structure ECS components optimally without human oversight, LLM-generated code reduces learning value for studying codebase, Claude may not emit Bevy sufficiently well despite strong Rust capability, Risk of creating spreadsheet simulator rather than engaging game

Feature requests: Bevy Remote Protocol wrapper for mouse/keyboard event injection and screenshot capture, In-sim information as tradeable commodity between agents, Faction escalation systems (blockades, monopolies, supply control)

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 702 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #63 of 703 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 263 days after the earliest competitor.

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.