A self-running space economy SIM in Rust and Bevy
I built this with Claude cause I always wanted to tinker with a simulation economoy and I love space themes. A space-economy sim where nothing is scripted. A few hundred autonomous ships each run their own planner. Some chase the best trade route, take a delivery contract, refuel, retrofit at a shipyard, or dock so the crew can rest before morale tanks. Markets price everything off supply with shortage-urgency multipliers, factions tax and subsidize, populations migrate when they're unhappy, and stations that go broke get abandoned and rot. It started as an Elixir/Phoenix prototype, but…
In plain words
A space economy simulation built in Rust and Bevy where hundreds of autonomous ships operate independently without scripting. Each vessel manages its own goals—trading, refueling, repairs, and crew rest—while markets dynamically price goods based on supply, factions levy taxes and subsidies, populations migrate based on satisfaction, and abandoned stations decay. The engine uses a pure synchronous ECS architecture with the Bevy renderer directly embedded, eliminating data marshalling between sim and graphics. Originally prototyped in Elixir, it was rewritten to Rust for better Windows performance.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
I built this with Claude cause I always wanted to tinker with a simulation economoy and I love space themes. A space-economy sim where nothing is scripted. A few hundred autonomous ships each run their own planner. Some chase the best trade route, take a delivery contract, refuel, retrofit at a shipyard, or dock so the crew can rest before morale tanks. Markets price everything off supply with shortage-urgency multipliers, factions tax and subsidize, populations migrate when they're unhappy, and stations that go broke get abandoned and rot. It started as an Elixir/Phoenix prototype, but the BEAM scheduler struggled on Windows gaming PCs, so I had Claude rewrite the engine in Rust. The sim core is pure, synchronous, IO-free (its own hecs ECS), and the Bevy client embeds it directly as a library, sim and renderer share one world with zero marshalling. Ship AI is a GOAP planner over a world state; ships replan mid-flight when a better option appears. ~485 agents today at p50 ~10-20ms/tick, architected to push toward 100k+. Single native binary, bundled SQLite, no runtime deps. Getting into 100k has been a struggle, but I have pushed it into the thousand and it was running fine. It's a sandbox, not a game yet, there's no objective yet, and I'm not actively pushing it toward "shippable." Anyone can fork it and take it over. Or it can stay as some type of AI slop, but part of me thinks it is already in a pretty good shape for a simulation use for various games or ideas. (Full disclosure: a lot of this was built pairing with Claude. That's how I had the bandwidth to take it this far. Happy to talk about what that workflow actually looked like.)
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