SEEDS - Terraform alien planets with a built-in RISC-V Linux emulator
Show HN: Our space game has a built-in RISC-V emulator that runs Linux
SEEDS is an upcoming space sandbox game where you terraform a desolate planet, build machines, and cultivate ecosystems. Its standout feature is an in-game computer: a complete 64-bit RISC-V virtual machine running an unmodified Linux kernel and a modified Alpine Linux distribution. This lets you play mini-games, program in any language, and later automate your sandbox. Currently in Early Access with sandbox mode, SEEDS will add survival and story modes, offering over 30 hours of narrative. Wishlist on Steam for Q4 2026.
The in-game computer is a complete 64-bit RISC-V virtual machine running an unmodified Linux kernel and a slightly modified Alpine Linux distribution.
- verst
I saw this on the steam page:
> our entirely in-house game engine PasVulkan, which powers SEEDS, as well as our RISC-V emulator PasRISCV, are both Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
Can you link to PasVulkan and PasRISCV please?
- nor-and-or-not
A few things about our RISC-V 64-bit emulator. Please forgive me, if I make some mistakes, but I'm not the expert on this.
First, PasRISCV not only emulates userspace (RV64GC usermode), but a complete, modern machine (SMP/MultiHART, RV64, full RVA23.1 including Hypervisor, Crypto, Vector stuff, etc.), which is capable of booting a normal Linux kernel (either using direct OpenSBI -> kernel boot, but currently everything has to be in the initrd then), or using U-Boot (OpenSBI -> U-Boot -> kernel).
The emulator uses a hybrid of interpreter with a tracing JIT. Currently, the JIT is limited to host x86-64. About 99% of all instructions and are supported by the JIT. For example, the host FPU is passed through to the guest. But PasRISCV also supports an optional stricter FPU mode, where with soft floats and interpreter only, because IEEE754-2008 has specific rules, that don't exist on the x86 architecture.
Disk images are provided either using VirtIO-Block or NVMe via PCIe. We can either use disks in normal read-write mode, or also in read-only mode. This allows us to have a root partition, that we can overwrite with game updates, and have a user partition, where custom player stuff is stored. We also can mount host dirs as external paths/mounts over VirtIO-9P or VirtIO-FS, which is especially useful for development because this allows us to compile guest tools directly on the host system.
To display graphics on our virtual game screen(s), we currently use a framebuffer device (via […]
- sippeangelo
Do you have a blog post about this? The link is to the home page and doesn't mention anything! Sounds super interesting but the landing page reads like survivalcraft in space #1001