NETRUN

A terminal-native computer life simulator. Start with nothing, take contracts, upgrade your rig, manage heat and burnout, survive the bills. A clean-room spiritual successor to the 1998 Russian shareware classic «Компьютерщик».

 NETRUN                                  ₿ 0.000600 ($36)  Day 1  ⚡100  Heat 0/100  Rep 0
 [1:Contracts] [2:Rig] [3:Market] [4:AI Models] [5:Stats] [6:Settings]
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 1. Scraper Cleanup — 10,633 sats · risk low · ~2u · exp d4                       │
│ 2. Backup Restore Job — 11,639 sats · risk low · ~3u · exp d4                    │
│ 3. Lost Wallet Recovery — 21,779 sats · risk low · ~3u · exp d4                  │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ > accept 1                                                                       │
│ Contract accepted: Scraper Cleanup (deadline: day 3)                             │
│ > run                                                                            │
│ Progress 1/2 (+1)                                                                │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Two eras

• CLASSIC (1998) — dollars, dial-up modems, boot-sector viruses, BBS gigs, demo-scene compos, Y2K audits.
• MODERN (2026) — sats (live BTC/USD display rate), GPUs and NPUs, AI model tools (Nano/Coder/Analyst/Oracle/Local-7B), wallet recovery and agent audits.

Same engine, different content pack. Pick the era at launch or pass --mode classic|modern.

Install & play

npx netrun            # easiest (Node >= 22)
# or
npm i -g netrun && netrun

Single-file binaries (no Node needed) are built per release for macOS (arm64/x64), Linux (x64), and Windows (x64, experimental): npm run binaries produces them in dist-bin/.

How it plays

Everything is keyboard + commands: tab/1-6 switch tabs, ↑/↓ select or walk command history, enter accepts/buys the selection or submits the typed command. Type help for the full list:

contracts · accept N · run [manual|hw|tool] [--safe] · abort
market · buy N · sell <id> · install <id> · uninstall <slot> · repair <slot>
tools · use <tool|none> · clean · status · rig · sleep · save · new · quit

The loop: accept a contract → choose an approach (manual labor, raw hardware, or an AI model/software tool) → run until it's done → get paid → upgrade → sleep. Sleeping pays rent and upkeep, restores energy, cools heat, rotates the contract board, and sometimes rolls an incident — malware, hardware damage, a surprise bill. Hardware wears out and breaks; infections grind it down nightly; deadlines miss; crit-fails hallucinate fake leads. Heat at 100 gets you busted; a negative balance ends the run. Quest chains (completing some contracts unlocks the next step) pull you into tier 2 and 3 work — if your rig and reputation can carry it.

Game state autosaves on every sleep and on quit; the game resumes automatically. Saves live in the OS data dir (~/Library/Application Support/netrun on macOS; override with NETRUN_DATA_DIR).

Headless mode (scripting / testing)

The whole game runs without the TUI through the same engine:

netrun --headless --seed 42 --mode modern \
  --script e2e/scripts/smoke.cmds --out transcript.json --rate 60000

The transcript records every command's parsed actions, emitted events, output lines, and a state snapshot — fully deterministic for a given seed (the RNG state lives inside the save file).

Under the hood

Built with TypeScript, React 19 and Ink 7 — the whole UI is React rendering to your terminal. The game core is a pure deterministic reducer with the RNG state inside the save file, so every run replays identically for a given seed. Distributed as a compiled bundle.

License

© 2026 Alex Struc. Free to download and play. Distributed as a compiled bundle only — redistribution of modified copies and reverse engineering are not permitted. All rights reserved.