Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Microcosm Industries – Simulation toys and software microcosms
I’ve been obsessed with simulation toys (software that allows you to play with a complex miniature world) ever since I was young and playing with SimCity and cellular automata. This kind of software exists at the delightful and weird intersection of simulation, complexity science, education, and gaming. And I want more of it! I created Microcosm Industries to initially act as a clearinghouse for simulation toys that are being built, ones that allow the user to playfully grapple with complex systems in all their interdisciplinary strangeness. But I’m also hoping that Microcosm Industries can…
Microcosm Industries is a clearinghouse for simulation toys—software that lets players interact with complex miniature worlds inspired by games like SimCity and cellular automata. The platform curates existing… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1AA
This is a weekend project that spiraled out of control. I was originally trying to get Claude to play a ROM of the SNES SimCity. I struggled with it and that led me to Micropolis (the open-sourced SimCity engine) and was able to get it to work by bolting on an API. The weekend hack turned into a headless city simulation platform where anyone can get an API key (no signup) and have their AI agent play mayor. The simulation runs the real Micropolis engine inside Cloudflare Durable Objects, one per city. Every city is public and browsable on the site. LLMs are awful at the spatial stuff, which…
Feb 2026 · hallucinatingsplines.com · its alternatives →
- 2
It all started as an experiment to see if I could build a game making heavy use of Deno and its SQLite driver. After sharing an early build in the „What are you working on?“ thread here, I got the encouragement I needed to polish it and make a version 1.0 for Steam. So here it is, Microlandia, a SimCity Classic-inspired game with parameters from real-life datasets, statistics and research. It also introduces aspects that are conveniently hidden in other games (like homelessness), and my plan is to continue updating, expanding and perfecting the models for an indefinite amount of time.
Dec 2025 · microlandia.city · its alternatives →
- 3AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 4
This is a little game implemented over a week of tinkering and targeting Emacs. The point is both to have fun with this kind of simulations, and also explore the "functional core / imperative shell" approach to architecture. I also developed a tile and tile effect definition DSL, which makes this even easier to extend. From this point of view it's a success: easy testing, easy extension, Gameplay-wise the simulation is too simplistic, and needs input from people interested in this kind of toys. The original Micropolis/SimSity is the last time I built a virtual city.
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Took a break from the falling sand simulation blog posts this week to work on another small project. It's a little pixel world generator- each time you visit, you'll see a new little world. I really like this stuff and had a blast building it yesterday!
2022 · jason.today · its alternatives →
- 6II
2019 · ericu.github.io · its alternatives →
- 7
Hi HN, I’m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game. Here's a simple runthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-moBz6upU. I pushed to get through a full product pathway to show the V-804 replay. I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied…
Mar 2026 · fuelingcuriosity.com · its alternatives →
- 8MW
2011 · demoseen.com · its alternatives →
- 9
I've liked all the projects that put LLMs into game environments. It's been a weird juxtaposition, though: frontier LLMs can one-shot full coding projects, and those same models struggle to get out of Pokémon Red's Mt. Moon. Because of this, I wanted to create a game environment that put this generation of frontier LLMs' top skill, coding, on full display. Ten years ago, a team released a game called Screeps. It was described as an "MMO RTS sandbox for programmers." The Screeps paradigm of writing code and having it executed in a real-time game environment is well suited to LLMs. Drawing on…
Feb 2026 · llmskirmish.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Microcosm▲12Build tiny voxel worlds in virtual reality!
2017 · paulstraw.itch.io · its alternatives →
- 11
An interactive ecosystem and evolution simulator written in C and OpenGL, for GNU/Linux. - connor-brooks/ecosim
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
I've been teaching LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering recently, via MCP tools hooked up to the open-source XMage codebase. It's still pretty buggy and I think there's significant room for existing models to get better at it via tooling improvements, but it pretty much works today. The ratings for expensive frontier models are artificially low right now because I've been focusing on cheaper models until I work out the bugs, so they don't have a lot of games in the system.
Feb 2026 · mage-bench.com · its alternatives →
- 13
TinyCity is a city simulation game inspired by SimCity for MicroPython - chrisdiana/TinyCity
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!
Jun 2026 · minigames.world · its alternatives →
- 15
As an AI you must gather training data by playing microgames
May 2026 · gathertrainingdata.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Snap together virtual LEGO bricks to create your own game
2020 · login.unity.com · its alternatives →
- 17
- 18MI
2015 · app.force12.io · its alternatives →
- 19
Hey HN, just wanted to share a fun, vibe-coded Friday night experiment: a little playground for writing cellular automata in a subset of Rust, which is then compiled into WGSL. Since it lets you dynamically change parameters while the simulation is running via a TUI, it's easy to discover weird behaviors without remembering how you got there. If you press "s", it will save the complete history to a JSON file (a timeline of the parameters that were changed at given ticks), so you can replay it and regenerate the discovery. You can pan/zoom, and while the main simulation window is in…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
- 21PA
I've been working for a while on trying to curate a game that has the emergence of procedurally generated computer games but that can be played with only pen and paper. Here I present the best version I've been able to come up with that is simple and emergent. I've really enjoyed being able to engage with this sort of game while not feeling like my brain in rotting. I recon my numeracy improves while playing it.
Jun 2026 · jameshylands.co.uk · its alternatives →
- 22
A Micromouse simulator: write and test maze-solving code without a physical robot - mackorone/mms
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23MW
Link: http://xoxo.cm The idea here was to build a multiplayer game with the lowest possible barrier to entry to get started. That is, no registration, no game setup, as few steps as possible to actually start playing. There's not much substance here right now and there's still a few bugs that need to be hammered out. I'm also thinking of expanding on the idea with some other simple games down the road. Any feedback or suggestions on the concept in general would be much appreciated.
2011 · xoxo.cm · its alternatives →
- 24
Notes on entropy and complexity. Contribute to RobinLinus/my-tiny-little-infinite-universe development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- AI agents play SimCity through a REST API alternatives
- Microlandia, a brutally honest city builder alternatives
- A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released alternatives
- Micropolis/SimCity Clone in Emacs Lisp alternatives
- Little Procedural Pixel Worlds alternatives
- I implemented Pong as a cellular automaton alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →