Show HN: Pen and paper resource development game with an emergent world
5 hours ago
- #resource management
- #paper-and-pen game
- #procedural generation
- Sortis is a pen-and-paper game designed for progression, automation, and discovery without digital computation.
- The game uses a procedurally generated 256x256 grid world where terrain (water, forest, mountain) is determined by XORing values from two LFSR sequences based on seeds.
- Mountains have ore levels determined by trailing zeros in the value, with higher ore levels being rarer, similar to Bitcoin's difficulty scaling.
- Buildings include Houses, Workshops, Extractors, Smelters, Roads, and vehicles (Wagons and Boats), with costs scaling as 2^n and requiring authorization from a Workshop of at least the same level.
- Agents perform one action per turn (move, clear, build, operate), and resources must be transported locally, with production managed via formulas to allow skipping turns.
- The game emphasizes minimal complexity, using hex and binary operations, with shortcuts like nibble checks to speed up map generation and gameplay.