The Space Project - Self-running space economy simulator in Rust and Bevy
Show HN: A self-running space economy SIM in Rust and Bevy
The Space Project is a fully autonomous space economy simulation built with Rust and the Bevy engine. It features hundreds of independent agents, including ships, facilities, and populations, that trade, mine, and migrate without scripted storylines. Powered by a GOAP planner, every ship dynamically decides its next move based on real-time market conditions, fuel levels, and crew morale. Markets self-regulate prices through supply and demand, while factions manage taxes and subsidies. This single-binary application offers a unique observer experience where users can watch a living solar system evolve, crash, and rebuild itself entirely through emergent behavior.
This started as a fun idea: a from-scratch space economy that actually simulates itself instead of faking it.
- sulam
It’s fun to see projects like this that seem largely unlocked by LLM assistance, and probably wouldn’t even get started if it weren’t for them. I know the hype cycle for LLMs seems to have hit its peak already, but I am fully convinced we are still in the early days of what we’ll be doing with them in software development. The only problem I see with projects like this is that there could be so many of them. Personally I’ve built at least 5 things that I had thought would be fun, but realistically I just didn’t have the time. Now I do, and if they only scratch my personal itches, that’s okay.
- awhitty
This is awesome. I've been working on a similar concept based on the Escape Velocity series and love the space trader genre in general. I'm curious how you've thought about the faction organization structures as well as information flows in the sim? Are agents omniscient about prices and postings? I ended up making in-sim information a commodity that agents could choose to sell to each other, but I didn't follow through fully baking that dynamic.
- lantry
I have also been using LLMs (mostly claude code) to develop a game with Rust and Bevy, and it seems to work very well. The strictness of rust seems to really help them get the code right, and the ECS architecture seems to make it easy for them to reason about how things work (because they only need to hold a few systems and components in context at a time).
makes me wonder if ECS will ever catch on outside the gaming industry. not sure if it's really the right architecture for web SAAS. Might be interesting to rewrite some big piece of software with ECS.
- qwertyastronaut
What is it about the space industry life that makes us developers adore it so much? :p
X4 Foundations just got a big update if you’re looking for a game built around this industry sandbox idea.
- hersko
Neat idea!
I think it would be cool if you can host a simulation and enable online viewers. Have the simulation accessible from a website (god-mode disabled of course), and have an agent generate some sort of newspaper or news bulletin of interesting things that happen.