Technical deep-dives on how the best simulation & strategy games are built — AI, tick scheduling, pathfinding and the data structures behind them.
How Prison Architect runs a whole prison on Introversion's custom C++/OpenGL engine: needs-based utility AI gated by the daily Regime, an object-component world, staggered utility/need ticks, and room-partitioned grid A*.
Inside Timberborn's Unity build: a per-column dynamic water simulation with drought and wet seasons, plus job-driven beavers that path across vertical structures.
Inside Workers & Resources: a custom-engine economy where every good is produced, transported and consumed as a tracked quantity across road, rail and pipeline graphs.
How Songs of Syx simulates tens of thousands of citizens: a custom Java/LWJGL engine and data-oriented design that trades per-agent fidelity for raw throughput.
How Satisfactory runs a planet-sized factory on Unreal Engine: hand-crafted world streaming, the Significance Manager, abstracted conveyor items and rail-graph trains.
How Factorio keeps thousands of belts and machines at a locked 60 UPS: a custom C++ deterministic engine, merged transport lines, sleeping entities and multithreaded updates.
Inside Dwarf Fortress: a single-dev custom C++ engine simulating a 3D tile world with 7-level fluids, a labor job queue, and A* short-circuited by a connectivity map.
How ONI runs cell-accurate thermodynamics for a whole asteroid: a native C++ simulation DLL under Unity/C#, a priority-scored chore system, and per-navtype A*.
How RimWorld runs a colony of hundreds on Unity/C#: ThinkTree AI, an object-component world, staggered Rare/Long ticks, and A* pruned by a region-and-room graph.