Byte Club

Simulacra is a real-time, multiplayer economic-policy simulator: a living pixel-art city where people and AI play out what a policy actually does to society. The problem: policy debates (like "raise the minimum wage to $20/hr") usually stop at first-order effects. It's hard to feel the second-order effects, such as rising prices, layoffs, shop closures, protests and falling approval, or how competing institutions pull against each other. What it does: a city of 12 actors (government, central bank, corporations, a union, the press, small businesses and households) reacts to a policy round by round. Players claim seats like the Central Bank or Workers United and pull real levers: interest rates, strikes, price pass-through, media spin. They can make deals with each other and resolve breaking crises. Every seat nobody claims is played by a local LLM that reasons each character's mood, dialogue and plans. Six live indicators (prices, unemployment, interest rate, approval, unrest, business survival) show the cascade, and each role has its own mission and live grade. How it's built: MongoDB Atlas is the shared world state: agents, events, indicators, players, pending actions, crises and deals. A version-bumped world document drives live updates, so every connected browser sees the same city at the same time. Local Hugging Face model: prism-ml/Ternary-Bonsai-27B-mlx-2bit (a ternary 27B model, about 8.5 GB) runs on Apple Silicon via MLX behind an OpenAI-compatible server. It needs no paid API, and the game falls back to a deterministic economic engine if the model is slow or unavailable. Stack: Next.js + Phaser frontend, FastAPI + LangChain backend, Python simulation worker, WebSockets for multiplayer. Why it matters: it turns abstract economics into something you can play with. It's useful for classrooms, policy workshops or just curious citizens: you can stress-test an idea with friends and watch the whole society respond.