A multiplayer ant colony with real personalities
Ant Farm is a multiplayer ant colony social simulation for the browser, equal parts digital terrarium and personality experiment. Every ant is a real person, with a job, an inventory, relationships that shift as they bump into each other, and a personality built from their own choices.
I built this because I want to watch a society happen, test out Claude Code's capabilities, and see if i can make friends along the way.
THE PERSONALITIES
Every ant is a real person
The colony is populated by actual people, and your ant's personality isn't assigned — it's earned. I've written over 100 questions that are tied to traits on MBTI-style axes (introvert to extrovert, thinking to feeling) crossed with a D&D-style alignment (evil to good, chaotic to lawful). What you pick shifts your ant's perspective on life, and it can build friendships or make enemies, because other ants are real people picking answers too.
A few seed ants with dynamic personalities live in the colony for testing purposes. Everyone else is exactly who they answered themselves into being.
THE SYSTEMS
A society needs rules,and a few problems
Underneath the cuteness is the systems layer: a capability system where experience gates what an ant can even attempt, stat caps so nobody becomes a god, role assignment, resource inventories (clay, roots, amber, the occasional artifact), and relationship scores that move with every interaction. And because every society needs its problems, there's an evil act system. Some ants are just like that.
I'm always sneaking in little extras too: when a new update ships, you and your 5 closest ant friends walk across the screen to announce it.
THE LESSON
The project that made my comprehension rule about using AI
Ant Farm is where I caught a component rendering differently in 2 places and realized the codebase had drifted past what I could follow. I stopped, restructured folders and files until another engineer could walk in and understand it, and made that a permanent rule for how I build with AI.
Coming soon
Compatibility update that increases sensitivity toward friendship growth
Creation and introduction of a centralized queen ant that promotes ants to bring back inventory items and bump into less familiar ants more often
Inventory usage to create different structures throughout the world that ants will visit if it matches their interests
Migration from Clerk to single sign-on with Google API