civterm

A Civ game in your terminal

Repo info

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Setup

Run make setup once after cloning to install the pre-commit hook (it runs make build — fmt, clippy, build, and all tests — before every commit):

make setup

Skip the hook for a single commit with git commit --no-verify.

Movement keys

Move your selected unit with the keys clustered around the j home key — laid out here as they appear on the keyboard (the arrow keys work too). j re-centres the camera on the selected unit.

y ↖	u N	i ↗
h W	j centre	k E
n ↙	m S	, ↘

What this is about

• A bit of fun, recreating what I remember from my early teen years in the mid 90s of the MacOS version of Civilization
• I don't touch the code - I summon it from OpenCode's Big Pickle LLM within the Zed text editor
• Coded in rust (I don't know rust)
• Written as a TUI (I've never written a TUI and I've never used Ratatui)

Screenshots of progress...

We have units!

We can found new cities!

We can drag the map around!

We can see what's happening in cities!

Cities can now make units and improvements!

We can sail the seven seas!

We can irrigate, mine, and build roads on tiles!

Civilizations can be conquered!

Inspiration

/me On a nostalgia binge, running an emulator...

• Son: Woah dad, that's so cool!
• Me: Yeah, this was the best game ever. I wasted most of my teen years playing it.
• Son: What game is it?
• Me: Civilization 1
• Son: What did you play it on? Was it on the Nintendo Switch?
• Me: Pfft. I used to play it on my beloved Apple Macintosh LC-475. The greatest machine ever. This thing here is just an emulator and I can't save the game :/
• Me: ...hmm...
• Me: Mabye I could...
• Son: What?
• Me: Maybe I should rewrite the game with AI...
• Me: ...and I could make it run in the terminal!
• Son: What's the terminal?
• Me: I have failed you.