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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

Is there a similar game that lets you place logic gates and do computing?

Bonus points if it's open source.

Nandgame and nand2tetris both take you on a journey from discreet transistors to a computer, in the form of a game. There's also Zachatronics games' TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O.

I'll offer some unsolicited rankings here for these:

Level of fun/addictiveness: Factorio<<<----, Shenzhen I/O, TIS-100, Nandgame, nand2tetris

Best story: Tossup for Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100, Factorio, nand2tetris, nandgame

Best order if you've never coded and want to get tricked into becoming an engineer: Factorio (but hard limit yourself here to no more than 2000 hours), then TIS-100, then Shenzhen I/O, then the Nands. I think Nand2tetris is more accessible as a learning tool.

Upshot - I highly recommend this list. :) Space Age (the Factorio DLC) has me wanting to do nand2tetris in Factorio now. Resisting..

nand2tetris is a book/course not a game lol I loved it though

Mindustry. It is open source and allows your to build logic gates.

Works on mobile, desktop, Linux, etc.

And according to this article [0] (from the mindustry article on Wikipedia), it was a hit on prison-issued android tablets until they banned it.

[0]: https://prisonjournalismproject.org/2024/03/31/popular-video...

A game called Turing Complete. Not open source, though AFAIK

Pretty different to Factorio, but Human Resource Machine is somewhat relevant and very enjoyable

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