First time hearing about this game but enjoyed it a lot. If you squint hard enough it reminds me of my favourite text game A Dark Room https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/
I used to play this game a ton several years ago. IIRC the world record score is believed to be over 19 000, however I've played thousands of games (with heavy save scumming, as the game is almost entirely RNG-based) and have yet to break 14k more than a couple of times.
Another form of high score to aim for is how many planets one can visit before your seedship finally gives in. For this, mine is 339 and I haven't seen any higher. However, all the information about the game end is stored in the shareable URL, so you can have games like https://www.johnayliff.com/games/seedship/index.html?bmmorab... if you want.
Several of John Ayliff's other Twine games are worth playing too, as well as the sequel/spiritual successor to Seedship – Beyond the Chiron Gate.
I've played this game a lot over the years. I wish there were more like it but I haven't found anything quite the same.
I liked the earlier version of it more though. Although the newer version has some interesting encounters, it feels less "natural" to me than the earlier version, like it's been made more difficult for its own sake.
I've always wished the planet descriptions weren't so dry, the RNG generates some pretty compelling combinations sometimes.
So I spared an hour or so and vibecoded this quick tampermonkey extension for the game. It scrapes the page and assembles a prompt from planet stats for AI image generators.
Try it out if you wanna give it a try, it supports both Gemini and OpenAI API, or you can just copy the prompt it generates and input it manually: https://pastebin.com/tGcJTBQw
Example of what it does - https://imgur.com/uIpthQS
I'd say Gemini(Nano Banana) definitely generates more interesting stuff than gpt-image. It's output is less realistic and it messes up often, but it actually manages to synthesize some pretty neat novel environments.
I love this game and have had it on my phone for many years. Funny to see this come up - I just played it a couple of times a day ago for the first time in a few years.
The environmental parameters reminds me a little of the old space 4x, Stars!.
Cute game. I break it out a couple times a year. There's been some great seed shop books (Watts's Freeze Frame Revolution, KSR's Aurora, Noumenon, Children of Time), and this is pretty different but has the spirit.
I've often felt that an updated version of Stars! would be very well received. So many current 4x games are hyper-micro-management and Stars! had a perfect balance (IMHO) between management and overall strategy.
Alas, Planets.nu has no source code available. That's OK if you just want to play, but I really always wanted to make some changes, and to self-host (like you kinda could in the original vga planets)
The UI and server are relatively simple though, so it should be a fun exercise to vibe-code a clone based on phost and openplanets.
My settlers became an immigrant population on a planet with native aliens. But it worked out in the end! “ They spend their time pursuing art, leisure, and spiritual fulfilment, while automatic machines take care of their material needs.”
I hadn't played the game in a while but I used to play it quite a bit some years ago. The game is rather RNG-heavy, and although you can usually pick your poison, luck is a large factor in how good a result you can get.
If you aim for the best possible result on each run individually, in a sense the game is about exploration vs. exploitation, or whether to settle with what you've got or try your luck for more.
(If you want to aim for record scores overall, it probably makes sense to take high risks and fail lots of runs.)
My settlers landed on a welcoming utopian post-scarcity post-singularity alien world whose inhabitants had centuries of engagement with the AI and had extended an offer of asylum, then somehow lost 271 people to cold and to poisonous plants before forming a corrupt democracy due to the death toll.
Better atmosphere, temperature, and water in the above run could add another 1k, so it seems that the maximum is at least 13k, though I suspect it is higher.
I have played the ever-living heck out of this game on subway rides. It's been a couple years since I last booted it, but it's a great timekiller in the sense that it still piques my imagination while not requiring me to think too hard.
The sequel "Beyond the Chiron Gate" adds more complexity to the formula, but is still fundamentally a similar game.
I landed humanity on the first, most desolate rock. They decided to engage in plutarchy for seemingly no reason. I was hoping it would be like dune, but I guess it was more like ancient egypt.
This reminds a little of the paperclip simulator, but this seems about 85% less likely to cause me to skip an entire day of work while clicking furiously. It's really good though!
