posted 1 hour ago
Hi everyone,
I’m John, founder of a small indie studio called Living Pattern Games. We’re developing Seed-Walkers, a third-person ecological RPG with voxel-based building, survival, crafting, settlement systems, and a world intended to respond systemically to what players build and change.
One question behind the project feels especially relevant here:
Could a game become a useful sandbox for testing regenerative building ideas before attempting them in the real world?
Alongside the game, we’ve been developing a framework called the Living Infrastructure Design Charter. One of its central ideas is to stop looking at a building as a collection of isolated technologies and instead ask how many useful relationships a place can support.
A greenhouse, for example, might produce food, buffer temperature, capture solar heat, interact with water storage, accept waste heat, influence humidity, and shelter another part of the building. But every additional relationship also introduces maintenance, material costs, failure points, and tradeoffs.
That immediately made me think about Earthships.
What if a player could build an Earthship-inspired structure and then see how that same design behaves in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Florida, Washington, or Alaska?
We eventually want variables such as solar exposure, thermal mass, climate, rainfall, humidity, ventilation, water storage, soil, vegetation, material properties, maintenance, and system failures to have meaningful consequences.
Not “the game says this building has +20 sustainability.”
More like: the greenhouse overheated, your cistern is undersized for this rainfall pattern, that thermal mass behaves differently in this climate, and losing one pump exposed three systems that depended on it.
Longer term, I’d also like to explore allowing sufficiently detailed player-built structures to be exported into CAD-friendly geometry or data, potentially giving someone a starting point for AutoCAD or another real design workflow.
That would absolutely not mean the game produced construction documents or proved a building was safe. An architect, engineer, builder, local codes, structural calculations, site conditions, and real-world physics still have the final word.
The idea is closer to a sketchbook with consequences: experiment cheaply in a simulated environment, discover questions and failure points, then carry the promising design into real professional tools.
So I’d really like to ask the people here who have built, lived in, repaired, or seriously studied Earthships:
If you were designing a simulation intended to teach something genuinely useful about an Earthship before construction, what would it absolutely need to model?
What tends to work differently in reality than newcomers expect? What changes most dramatically between climates? What failure or maintenance issues would a useful simulation need to expose?
And perhaps my favorite question:
What Earthship or regenerative-building experiment would you try if materials, money, and the risk of damaging your actual house temporarily disappeared?
We’re not trying to build a game that claims to have solved sustainable architecture. I’d much rather build a place where people can safely test ideas, discover why some fail, and learn to ask better questions before concrete gets poured. 🌱
