Colony Sims

Colony sims are the genre where you never quite finish a game, you just reach the point where the story got good enough to stop. You place a few colonists on a map, they start hauling and eating and arguing, and the systems underneath do the rest: hunger, temperature, power, morale, injury, and the slow accumulation of small decisions that turn into a settlement. Nobody wrote the plot. The plot is what happened when the winter came early and the only doctor was the one with the broken leg.

The lineage runs through Dwarf Fortress, which set the bar for simulation depth so high that people still write novels out of their save files, and RimWorld, which made that depth legible with a storyteller AI that deliberately aims for drama instead of fairness. Oxygen Not Included pushed it toward hard systems engineering. Factorio and Satisfactory took the logistics half and ran. Frostpunk added a moral vise. Space Haven and Stardeus moved the whole thing into orbit. Songs of Syx scaled it up to cities. The genre's common thread is not the setting, it is that the simulation is the author.

We are building one: Pappus, a space colony sim about cats, where each cat is an individual with needs, a personality, and a utility model deciding what it actually wants to do next. The posts below cover the genre broadly, where to start if the depth looks intimidating, and the design question underneath all of it: what makes a simulation produce stories worth retelling.