A small studio experiment

LUNAR ARCADE

Three classic simulation games, taken apart for the idea underneath and rebuilt from scratch on the Moon. Everything here runs in the browser, is written from the ground up, and borrows nothing from the originals but the shape of a good idea.

▶ PLAY THE BORING MINING GAME ◈ MISSION CONTROL

THE CABINET

FROM THE COLONY SIM

The Boring Mining Game

A lunar ISRU mining programme run one drone at a time. You pilot DRONE-01; the rest of the swarm is autonomous. Bore tunnels through regolith and basalt, haul ilmenite and volatiles back to the plant, and drop scent beacons the swarm will follow — a productive seam becomes a highway because your drones keep reinforcing the trail home. Every tonne delivered builds the surface plant out another module, and the surplus flies to Earth orbit on a cargo stack. Meanwhile Helios Extraction works the same rock from the far side of the mare, and only one fabricator walks away from this contract.

  • Diffusing, evaporating scent fields drive the whole swarm — no scripted paths
  • Ore smell propagates through rock, so drones bore toward what they can smell
  • A surface plant that grows: solar arrays, high-gain dish, volatile tanks, radiators, habitat dome — then launches cargo to Earth
  • Solar economy on a compressed lunar day/night cycle
  • Lose your drone and the link jumps to the nearest unit — you only die when the swarm does
  • Autoplay hands the controls to an agent that wins unaided, plus a 0.25×–8× speed dial
PLAY NOW PLAYABLE

FROM THE FARM SIM

Lunar Farm

Pressurised grow halls on the rim of a lava-tube skylight, dragged out to whatever size you want. Balance light hours against power, water against recycling losses, and crop choice against a colony that has to be fed — through a night that lasts a fortnight and takes the solar arrays with it. Regolith is not soil until you make it soil: fresh beds are sterile dust and only come good as you work roots and stubble back through them.

  • Drag out halls, roads and rail; freight trains then work the line on their own
  • A closed carbon loop — a surplus farm exports carbon inside the food it sells
  • Crops that have actually flown: Veggie lettuce, VEG-05 tomato, PH-04 chile, Apogee wheat
  • Telemetry you can read as a report to Earth or as a note to the settlers
  • Auto-manage, a sandbox, and a league of past runs with JSON export
PLAY NOW ↗ PLAYABLE OFF-SITE

FROM THE TOWER SIM

Lunar Habitat

The vertical-builder formula, upended: the surface is the worst floor in the building. Tower upward for sunlight, observatories and comms — or excavate downward, level by level, where the rock itself is your radiation shielding. Run shafts, keep commutes short, bank two weeks of power before every lunar night, and grow a six-person outpost into a chartered lunar capital.

  • Dig down 24 levels, build up 26 — excavation gets pricier with depth, safety gets better
  • 28-day lunar cycle: 14 days of solar bounty, 14 days of battery-draining darkness
  • Transit-distance scoring: every module is rated on its commute back to an airlock
  • Solar flares, moonquakes, micrometeorites — and regolith shield caps to survive them
  • Six charter tiers, from Outpost to Lunar Capital, each unlocking new modules
  • Autopilot mode — a colony director AI that builds, digs and balances the books itself
  • A Mission Control dashboard reporting growth curves and a board grade back to Earth
  • Sandbox mode: every module free, every tier unlocked
  • A persistent league table that scores every finished run on a dozen itemised factors
PLAY NOW PLAYABLE

ABOUT THESE GAMES

These are original games, written from scratch in vanilla JavaScript. They are tributes to a genre, not ports, remasters or reskins: no code, artwork, audio or data files from any commercial game are used, included or distributed here. Game mechanics — colony simulation, pheromone-trail pathing, resource economies — are ideas, and ideas are free to build on. The specific expression of the originals belongs to the people who made them, and stays with them.

If you own a copy of one of the classics that inspired these, play it. They hold up.