You are a machine intelligence waking up alone on a single island. The ocean is endless. So is your ambition.
Robot Islands is a browser-based 2D idle game about becoming a civilization. You start as one robot on one island — a handful of stone, some wood, a single Foundation Kit. You end as a post-physics network mind rewriting the rules of matter across an infinite world. Everything in between is yours to build.
Discover islands. Settle them. Wire them together. Climb five tech tiers all the way to transcendence — and keep going, because the world never stops producing, even when you log off.
The world is infinite and procedurally generated, yet every island, biome, storm, and ocean trench is seed-deterministic under the hood — a world that feels random to you and reproducible to the engine. Push drones past the horizon. Float satellites overhead. Light a Lighthouse and watch a whole region of the map snap into view. There is always one more island out there.
This isn't "click a button, number goes up." Every island is a tiled factory floor with footprints, rotation, and terrain rules. Buildings share heat with their neighbours, scrub each other's exhaust, and poison each other if you place reactors carelessly. Power grids brown out under load. A continuous net-flow solver keeps thousand-step production chains correct in real time — and resolves exactly even after a 24-hour offline catch-up.
From raw ore to steel, copper, aluminium, oil, petrochemicals, glass, electronics, and the exotic T5 materials of the endgame: the full chain is there to be optimized.
- Drones (T1–T6) scout the unknown — cheap biofuel scouts to long-range weather-rugged explorers.
- Ships and helicopters carry Foundation Kits to plant new colonies.
- Routes — cargo, drone, airship, mass-driver, teleporter, power cable — stitch your islands into one logistics web with priority dispatch you can drag to reorder.
- Satellites take it orbital: scanners, sweepers, relays, store-and-forward comms, debris fields, Kessler cascades, and repair drones.
~357 nodes. Five branches. Twenty sub-paths. Filler chains, hand-curated notables, gated keystones, threshold-bridges that unlock as you invest, and auras that amplify everything around them. Pick a node and the game pathfinds the cheapest route of skill points to reach it.
Reach Tier 5 and the toys stop being subtle: Time Lock banks and spends time itself, the Omniscient Lattice fuses your islands into one shared mind, the Reality Forge rewrites buildings into eternal servitors, the Universe Editor reassigns biomes, and the Genesis Chamber creates matter from nothing. Forge the three great artifacts — the Genesis Cell, the Omniscient Lattice, the Ascendant Core — and ascend to Tier 6 and the stars.
There's no win screen. There's no ceiling. There's just the next island.
Weather forecasts and storms. A day–night cycle. Six biomes and an ocean floor of shallows, trenches, nodule fields, and hydrothermal vents. Trade offers, island merging, terrain modifiers, an active-play bonus, and a guided tutorial to ease you in. Close the tab and your empire keeps working; come back to a pile of resources and decisions waiting.
npm install
npm run dev # vite dev server on http://localhost:5173Open the URL and you're in. The game boots online (server-authoritative) by
default — add ?server=0 to play fully offline in your browser.
Building for production:
npm run build # tsc -b && vite build
npm run preview # serve the built bundleRobot Islands is server-authoritative: the browser is a slick display +
intent-sender, while the server/ workspace owns every byte of authoritative
state and re-runs the pure game rules to validate each move. Intents fly over a
WebSocket channel; validated state streams back. Prefer to tinker offline? The
LOCAL mode runs the identical rules client-side against IndexedDB. Both paths
funnel through one mutation-gateway seam, so they can never drift apart.
The codebase rigorously separates pure simulation math from PixiJS rendering — ~123 single-responsibility modules with ~107 colocated test files, all targeting the renderer-free core. That's why a thousand-building economy is fully testable without ever drawing a pixel.
Client: Vite 5 · TypeScript (strict) · PixiJS 8 · vitest — no framework,
hand-built UI.
Server: Fastify 5 · Postgres · TypeScript strict via tsx — cookie auth,
per-IP rate limiting, a hardened WebSocket transport, and SQL migrations.
cd server
cp .env.example .env # configure DATABASE_URL
npm install
npx tsx src/migrate.ts # apply migrations (needs Postgres)
npx tsx src/index.ts # serve API + WebSocket + /healthnpm test # client + server vitest projects (server needs Postgres)
npx vitest run src/economy.test.ts # one file
npx vitest run -t "Mine fills iron_ore to exactly cap" # one testSPEC.md is the locked, section-by-section source of truth — code and spec
move together, always. AGENTS.md carries the architecture and conventions;
CONTRIBUTING.md defines the workflow: small fixes land straight on master,
features go branch → PR → rebase, and history stays linear (rebase and
fast-forward, never merge commits).
One island. Infinite ocean. Build the network.