Summary—Run a crew of robot crabs on the sea floor: scout for metal, drill it, smelt it in lava, and sell it up to the surface for crab profit. The sea behind this page comes from it.
Crabminer is a small city builder on a layered paper-dune sea floor. Scouts flag deposits, drills dig them up, haulers carry nodules to the ore pile, crushers press bars, smelters melt them into ingots in a lava cave, and a riser sells the metal to a ship at the surface.
The sea has a mind of its own: tides, storms, lava surges, an octopus after your ore, a moray eel in a crack, cargo ships with orders, a rival crew of lobsters, a hermit-crab trader, a sea turtle that gives crabs a lift, and whales passing overhead. The crabs talk in emoji sentences and dance with idle neighbours.
It is one static page with no build step or dependencies, running a deterministic simulation that its own rules paper is checked against.
Highlights
- Eight crab trades, work shifts, breakdowns, and repairs forged in lava
- Six ranks from Sand Scraper to Crab Tycoon
- A deterministic simulation, with tests
- No libraries, no build step
At a Glance
| Language | JavaScript, HTML, CSS |
|---|---|
| Platform | Any modern browser |
| License | MIT |
| Website | crabminer.com |
| Source | github.com/crabminer/crabminer |
Pictures
Fig. 1. Crabminer: robot crabs on layered sand dunes, a collector, and the crew panel