Spacetraders is a "space-themed economic game with HTTP endpoints for automating gameplay and building custom tools." It's had me hooked during the evenings the last couple weeks in a "just one more turn" sort of way.

UI

I kicked off with a minimal web frontend to explore the mechanics of the game. Specifically, I built three pages to get started:

A market UI where I could see all the waypoints with markets and what goods they were importing and exporting.

A fleet UI where I could see the status of my ships, have them mine an asteroid, refuel as needed, transfer cargo to other ships, or fly around the system.

An rpc builder UI where I could hit arbitrary endpoints to fill the gaps for things that I hadn't added in my other pages (buying ships, handling contracts, etc).

Automation

Once I got the hang of the intro mechanics to the game, I started building some basic automation. This was done with a nodejs server that tells the fleet what to do.

Each ship is given a persona that assigns it an event loop which contains a sequence of actions to repeat indefinitely. I currently have five personas in use:

The Hauler persona (for my freighters) which has them fly to an asteroid, load from other ships until their inventory is full, and sell their cargo at a nearby market.

The Miner persona (for my drones) which has them fly to an asteroid and mine whenever they have cargo space.

The Pricer persona (for my probes) which has them fly in a loop around the different markets and stores the prices of goods in a postgres db. This uses a naïve nearest neighbor algorithm for generating the route.

The Trader persona (for my frigate) which has it find the most profitable good in the system, pick it up at one waypoint and sell it at another.

The NOOP persona for ships I have stationed at a particular waypoint (e.g. so I can buy ships at its shipyard, etc).

Current Status

The game is an alpha, so the server resets every ~3 weeks. The last reset was on 2024-08-11 (I started playing a little before then) and my handle for this reset is ZAKHAROV.

At time of writing, I have ~1.5 million credits which puts me 14th on the leaderboard for this reset (mind you there are very likely more players that have more credits than me if you include the cost of their ships (and 1st is currently at ~500 million, so there is that)).

My fleet consists of 21 ships: 1 frigate, 4 probes, 1 shuttle, 3 freighters, and 12 drones.

What's Next

There are several directions I could go from here. Some ideas in no particular order:

• Add ship information to my DB and build a live visualization of where all my ships are at any given time.
• Add a queueing server between my API calls and the game server, to avoid hitting the dreaded "You have reached your API limit" errors.
• Explore more mechanics of the game (visiting other system, market dynamics, etc).
• Port my codebase to another language. I built this out quickly using JS, but it could be fun to try out Rust or Elixir or something well suited to this sort of project.