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Show HN: Termcraft – Terminal-first 2D sandbox survival in Rust
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 progression
This is still early alpha, but it’s already playable.
Project:
https://github.com/pagel-s/termcraft https://github.com/pagel-s/termcraft
Docs:
https://pagel-s.github.io/termcraft/ https://pagel-s.github.io/termcraft/
Demo:
https://youtu.be/kR986Xqzj7E https://youtu.be/kR986Xqzj7E
- apitman 7mo agoNice. Is this terminal-first or terminal-only?
- sebosch 7mo agogood point, it is terminal only
- Heer_J 7mo ago[dead]
- kehao95 7mo agoThis is art!
- torginus 7mo ago[flagged]
- westmeal 7mo agoYou really don't want to know. The results could be disastrous.
- sebosch 7mo agohaha, guilty
- vunderba 7mo agoRust is the crossfit of programming languages. Everybody around you needs to know at all times. On a serious note, nice job OP. This game kind of feels like an ASCII version of Terraria. Might I recommend extended ASCII or unicode for the player though? Right now they look a bit like a lollipop.
- sudo_cowsay 7mo agoKind of hard to see the player's motion
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- cjkaminski 7mo agoBased on the evidence presented by the Hacker News front page, the hype is boundless. Rust is the ur-language that we never realized until... idk, three years ago?
- zeroq 7mo agoIt's a PR ploy. It sounds better than X done in C, mainly because the X has been done countless times in C by now, while "Hello World, but in Rust" still felt sexy three years ago.
- xylophile 7mo agoIf somebody announces that their project is written in Rust but nobody complains, what happens? Writing any non-trivial video game with Rust is (arguably) interesting in itself since developer velocity in gamedev is generally considered paramount, and Rust has a reputation (rightly or wrongly) for hindering velocity. So yes, the fact that this is written in Rust is actually relevant and valuable. As opposed to your hollow snark. Now, OP: tell us more about how that's played out for you.
- zeroq 7mo agoOne does not simply write an app in Rust in silence. It is customary to announce the fact so that the astrologers can proclaim that the population of recruiters on linkedin has increased.
- frail_figure 7mo agoRust is fine, but so is C, Zig, Odin, Lua, etc. I dont think the parent comment was complaining, just pointing out the "written in rust" meme. Being the top comment, seems like plenty of people enjoyed it! It's the weekend, take it easy :)
- p0w3n3d 7mo agoWow finding the nether fortress will sure take time in 2d world and will render it unskippable
- sudo_cowsay 7mo agoThat is kinda true, I wonder how the end will be like... 2D dragon!
- Gigachad 7mo agoSeems like it would be possible to create a cool demo where you can play the game over ssh rather than having to compile locally.
- verdverm 7mo agoTangential to this cool project, Hytale has an amazing modder experience and toolset built into the game. Everything is JSON driven, with hot reload, so we can build tooling in any language (without needing to name said language, lol to that thread here, ahem, I'm using CUE, ahem). They have flags to dump the JSONschema for everything, including mods, as well. More related, Worldgen v2 is pretty amazing compared to Minecraft. What is the basis for the Worldgen in this project? Not too different from a 3d voxel game? I'm pretty new to it and have a general curiosity still. https://hytalemodding.dev https://hytalemodding.dev
- swaminarayan 7mo agoHow do you build a procedurally generated survival game in a terminal without a graphics engine?
- samiv 7mo agoIs this a serious question? Well OF COURSE you just prompt Claude... /s No seriously why would you need a graphics engine for procedurally generating content? In this particular case for example his "content" is the world map expressed in some units (tile grid) across two axis. Then you generation algorithm produces that 2d data and that's that.
- tdeck 7mo agoFolks have been doing it for decades. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike
- johnisgood 7mo agoWait till he finds out there are text-based adventure games!
- absynth 7mo agogood stuff. keep going. any way to link instances together? I'm interested in something like this to import/export resources etc.
- yuppiepuppie 7mo agoThis is cool! Feel free to add it to https://hnarcade.com https://hnarcade.com :)
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- nickdothutton 7mo agoI wonder if you could do a good Atari Gauntlet clone as a terminal only game.
- danielszlaski 7mo agoTerminal Minecraft with brewing and dragon progression in Rust. Didn't expect to want this, but here we are. Bookmarked.
- profer602 7mo ago[dead]