Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Symbiants – digital ant farm / mental health companion
Hello HN! Hope you are well. I'm creating my first video game. It's nowhere near complete, but I am eager for feedback, so here I am! My game is a digital ant farm. You should think SimAnt + Tamagotchi. Here's a picture: https://i.imgur.com/dIJaraG.png It's written in Rust/Bevy, compiled to WASM, and is open-source, https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants. Fair warning, though, this is my first time writing in Rust/Bevy. My goal is to give people cute ants that do cute ant stuff 24/7, ask people to look after their ants and to feed them…
Symbiants is a digital ant farm game where players care for virtual ants that perform activities continuously. Built in Rust and Bevy and compiled to WebAssembly as an open-source project, the game combines simulation… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Symbiants – digital ant farm / mental health companion launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Hello everyone! I created a short game in just a few days, just for fun, where you play as an ant and feed it apples This game also features random landscape generation, with clouds and trees arranged in a chaotic pattern across all coordinates. This is what took me the longest time :) I would appreciate your feedback ^ ^
2025 · aanthonymax.github.io · its alternatives →
- 2AS
I was inspired to make a web based ants simulator after watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81GQNPJip2Y Any feedback appreciated. Best viewed on Chromium based browsers. Firefox is slow for some reason and Safari is not tested as I don't have a Mac.
2022 · ants-sandbox.io · its alternatives →
- 3
We built an ant colony simulation as an internal hiring challenge at Moment and decided to open it up publicly. You write a program in a custom assembly-like (we call it ant-ssembly) instruction set that controls 200 ants. Each ant can sense nearby cells (food, pheromones, home, other ants) but has no global view. The only coordination mechanism is pheromone trails, which ants can emit and sense them, but that's it. Your program runs identically on every ant. The goal is to collect the highest percentage of food across a set of maps. Different map layouts (clustered food, scattered,…
Mar 2026 · dev.moment.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Hello HN! I'm the author of Ant, a JavaScript ecosystem built around a runtime with its own JavaScript engine. Ant also includes a package manager, the ants.land package registry, a platform for deploying and hosting applications, and Ant Desktop for building native desktop apps with web technologies, similar to Electron. The goal is for these pieces to work as one coherent platform while remaining compatible with the wider JavaScript ecosystem. It's still early, and I'd appreciate any feedback on the overall direction or what you'd like to see from an e2e alternative to the existing…
Jul 2026 · antjs.org · its alternatives →
- 5
A flexible event/agent & automation system with lots of bees 🐝 - muesli/beehive
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Viberia▲146Hey HN, This is my take on the agent harness. Everything on an isometric map. Agents are grouped into "buildings" that run in a sequence or a loop; e.g., the CodeForge has an agent that writes a PRD, another one that implements, and a third that reviews. Everything is customizable, you build your own buildings/teams however you want. It's a Tauri app, really light (about 8x less energy than the closest competitor I benchmarked, so it actually runs from a coffee shop on battery). It's macOS only for now, but ping me if you are willing to test the Windows or Linux version. I've been…
May 2026 · getviberia.com · its alternatives →
- 7
- 8
Hey, everyone! I'm making a game: its title is Nests & Insects and I call it a "Roguelike Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TTRPG)". It is free, as in beer and speech. You can find the rulebook on the game's github repository, linked through the post title. Nests & Insects is a game for 1 to 7 players, one of which takes on the role of the Game Queen (GQ) and describes the game world to the other players. The players control characters who explore and interact with the game world. The players say what their characters do and roll dice to see what happens, then the GQ describes the results. Players'…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
He's 13 years old. He wanted to track his own ant colonies — growth, feeding, humidity, and other metrics. He built the whole app himself with some help from AI tools; I just helped him deploy it to a server. Would love to hear your feedback!
Jun 2026 · formicarium.es · its alternatives →
- 10
Around three years ago, I was reminiscing about how much I loved playing Neopets as a kid. Meanwhile, I was also looking for a project to better learn Rust and SolidJS. So.. I figured making my own virtual pet browser game would be a fun way to practice! Since then, I’ve been working on it nearly every day, and.. it’s grown quite a bit! Here are some bulleted lists for your convenience: Technical Details: * Backend monolithic Rust server runs on a single $5/month VPS * Lean frontend with just 3 dependencies (SolidJS, Solid Router, and Mutative) * Around 130,000 combined lines of code…
2025 · mochia.net · its alternatives →
- 11
Bugsy▲95Give a voice to insects and build your collection
Apr 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Earlier this year, we released our open-source game engine [0] built with Rust, WebAssembly, and WebGPU. Today, we’re happy to announce the Ambient platform, which brings web deployment, server hosting, and more to the runtime. With Ambient, you can make a game, deploy it to the browser in one command, share your URL and instantly play with others, no downloads or installs needed. Our WASM use is innovative; it is being used as both a sandboxed runtime for user code, and as a way to run the entire Ambient runtime in the browser. This, paired with our ECS data model, enables a highly modular…
2023 · ambient.run · its alternatives →
- 13
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 →
- 14
hey hn, i built beehive for myself mostly. it has gotten to the point where my work consists in supervising oc or cc labor at tasks for multiple issues in parallel. my set up used to be zellij with a couple tabs, each tab working in a separate dir and it was a pain to manage all that. i know i could use git worktrees but they're kind of complicated, if you don't know how to use them it is easy to mess up, and i just prefer letting agents run in separate dirs with their own .git and not risk it. while i like zellij and use it inside beehive, i dont like the tabs and i forget where i am half…
Feb 2026 · storozhenko98.github.io · its alternatives →
- 15PT
I think the very first video game I ever played was Bugdom by Pangea Software, which came with the original iMac. There was also a shooter called Nanosaur, but my 7-year-old heart belonged to the more peaceable Bugdom, which featured a roly-poly named Rollie McFly needing to rescue ladybugs from evil fire ants and bees. Upon seeing the port to modern systems (https://github.com/jorio/Bugdom), I figured it should be able to run entirely in-browser nowadays, and also that AI coding tools "should" be able to do this entire project for me. I ended up spending perhaps 20 hours…
Feb 2026 · reallyeli.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Simulation of ants colony in python. Contribute to riiswa/colony-ant-simulator development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17EA
I built an artificial life simulator that fits in one HTML file (~1400 lines ~50KB) with Claude Opus 4.6, interestingly, I didn't even ask it to build the game itself, I've requested to create the software that didn't exist before and not use any dependencies, third-party libraries or ask questions. Firstly Opus 4.6 made photoshop clone that barely worked, but had nice and neat UI with all common features for the image editor, then I've called that crap and asked to really build someting that wasn't there, it made Emergent there. Please check it out and tell what you think, of course it's a…
Feb 2026 · emergent-ivory.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey HN, I made https://linkians.com which is a game where all the action and state is contained in the url. The game involves taking care of little pets (emojis) that live in your url bar. Kind of like tamagotchi or sims. Feed them, play with them, and watch out for enemies! There's no server, just emojis in the url and client-side logic. Any linkians url using the supported emojis is a valid game state so you can save your game, or type out your own url and send it to a friend. I'd appreciate any feedback.
2022 · linkians.com · its alternatives →
- 19MC
Hey all, just wanted to share a little game experiment. It's a rooms & keys kind of adventure with a lot of random deaths. It plays a Veo3-generated video in response to clicks, with Gemini used for coding. Prompting the videos was fun, but trying to vibe code everything was not. In the future I'll go back to using LLMs more sparingly for isolated functions, or at least try not to have it create anything that requires seeing the output to debug.
2025 · bemmu.com · its alternatives →
- 20MF
I know everyone is a bit burned out on blockchain and cryptocurrency related stuff around these parts, but I've been working on as a side project for the last few months and thought you guys might be interested: https://cryptoempire.io/ It's still a bit buggy and incomplete (the mobile ux needs a lot of work, the leaderboard isn't functional yet, etc.), but I've reached a point where I'm not totally ashamed of sharing it :) Any feedback would be most welcome!
2018 · its alternatives →
- 21
I hereby present my little tiny pet project that entertained me for the past six months. In this post, I briefly present Maginet and its technical components. It is a turn-based strategy game that is built using Rust and compiles to WebAssembly with HTML5 bindings, which works on mobile and desktop alike! It comes with many game mechanics and components, including an AI opponent and online cross-platform multiplayer. There is so much to discuss even for a project of a smaller scale, but I am nevertheless excited to share a little bit about how you can actually build a game in Rust,…
2023 · evrim.zone · its alternatives →
- 22HO
gm gm, We’re excited to show our project, Hive Network, a new frontier for decentralized AI agents that operate both on-chain and off-chain. Our mission is to make AI more powerful and transparent, and we’re inviting you to join us in this revolution. What is Hive Network AI? -- Hive Network AI is a platform where developers can create, deploy, and manage AI agents that function autonomously across blockchain and traditional networks. Our system addresses significant issues in the AI space, such as the lack of transparency, difficulty in monetizing models, and insufficient research funding.…
2024 · hivenetwork.ai · its alternatives →
- 23
Genetic Algorithms, Mutation, Crossover, Mating, Particle Animation, Gaming, Learning, P5JS, Fun Project - dg92/ant_sugar
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
AI alien dogs want to live in your computer. Let them in?
May 2026 · bkawa-bot.github.io · its alternatives →
Also compare
- I created a small 2D game about an ant alternatives
- Ants Sandbox - an ants simulator alternatives
- Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language alternatives
- Ant – A JavaScript runtime and ecosystem alternatives
- Beehive – An open source IFTTT powered by Go's templating engine alternatives
- Viberia 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 →