Show HN: Town – Discord in a pixel town where the NPCs have skills

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Discord, but you walk around a pixel town — where the NPCs have skills.

What is Town

A town is a small map of buildings, and every building is its own little experience with an AI character inside it. What each character is comes from two things: a personality — how they talk, what they care about, their backstory — and a skillset, the CORE tools their author handed them. Give a character web search and they'll look you up before they talk. Give them memory and they'll remember you next time. Give them a Google Docs tool and they'll write a real document with you. Personality makes them fun to talk to; the tools make them able to actually do something about it.

And it's not a solo experience.

Wander with friends

Friends show up live, walking around the same town you're in — wave, bump into each other, or just see who else is around.

Two visitors crossing paths in the overworld — population counter top right, chat bubble open.

Talk to the AI characters

Walk up to a building, press SPACE, and talk to whoever lives there. They react to what you actually say, not a script — and a few of them hand you something to keep at the end of a good conversation.

Pitching a startup idea to Garry inside YC House.

Jump into a group chat

Step into a building with other people, press G, and everyone in the room — humans and AI characters alike — shares one chat. The characters jump in on their own, so a quiet room turns into a scene.

Explore the towns

We've built five towns you can walk into right now. Each is a different world with its own cast of characters — start with CORE Town, then pick whichever bit sounds like your kind of fun.

🏙️ CORE Town

One town that shows off everything a town can be. Seven wildly different rooms under one roof: pitch your startup to Garry at YC House, explain an Earth custom to Ambassador Xelos at the Alien Embassy, stand trial for your digital sins at the Trial of You, get worked over by a noir detective at the Detective Office, get roasted on the Roast Stage, or just sit at The Last Call and let Sera the bartender listen. You can even meet the real people building CORE at Core HQ. Walk out with collectible tags — YC Applicant, First Contact, Convicted, Roasted, Person of Interest.

→ Take the tour · no signup, arrow keys to move, SPACE to talk. Best place to start.

🔪 Murder Mystery Town

A real whodunit. Iris Bell is dead in an alley, less than twelve hours cold, and you're the visiting detective. Detective Reeve briefs you at The Precinct, then it's on you: work the estranged mother at The Manor, the nervous baker at The Cake Shop, the reporter at The Newsroom, the records clerk, the coroner, and the ex-fiancé at The Boxing Club. Every character knows one piece of the truth — and each has something to hide. Catch someone in a contradiction, figure out who killed Iris, and report back to Reeve to close the case and earn a Case Closed card.

→ Play

🚀 AI Startup Town

Get in a room with AI avatars of famous investors — Paul Graham, Garry Tan, Michael Seibel, Dalton Caldwell, and more. Pitch your idea, stress-test your plan, or just talk through whatever's on your mind about your startup. Each one brings a different lens (founder story, product, traction, distribution), so you can wander from partner to partner and get the whole board's take.

→ Play

🎙️ Interview Town

Your mock-interview practice ground. AI interviewers help you prep for a role — tell them the job you're going for and they'll put you through it, each with a different style and focus: system design with Alex Xu, the coding round with Gayle McDowell, a McKinsey-style case with Victor Cheng, or a tough on-camera grilling with Piers Morgan. They look up your real LinkedIn or GitHub first, then interview you and hand you a scorecard so you know where you stand.

→ Play

🔥 Roast Town

A fun place to show off — or sharpen — your roast skills by trading burns with AI avatars. Smoky asks what you brought to be roasted, then sends you to the right room: Sensei Slim coaches your burns at the Burn Dojo, Vinny takes you on in a live roast battle at the Clap-Back Bar, jaded VC Chad Ventures roasts your pitch, and 10x-dev Rex tears apart your stack. Give as good as you get and leave with a roast card worth screenshotting.

→ Play

🌍 Explore more

Anyone can publish a town, and plenty have. Browse every town the community is making, ranked by how alive they are (a mix of energy and how many people visit) — so a small town people love climbs past a big empty one.

→ Public town leaderboard

Build your own

Once you've poked around a few towns, the natural thought is "what would mine look like?" — and you can just go build it. Your own buildings, your own characters, written however you want, around whatever's actually going on in your life or work:

Your actual life — a gym with a coach who knows your training streak, a library with a critic who knows what you've been reading.

A side project or startup — your own pitch room, where visitors get grilled by an investor-style character.

A hobby — a record store run by someone who only wants to talk music.

Just something fun — a trial room, a roast stage, whatever bit you want.

Then send people the link. They can walk around, chat with you directly if you're both online, and talk to your characters the same way you talked to the ones in CORE Town — except now they're yours. Even when no one's visiting, you can hang out with your own characters whenever you feel like it.

When it's ready, publish it to the public leaderboard — towns are ranked by how alive they are (a mix of energy and how many people visit), so a small town people love climbs past a big empty one.

Editing a town is the same as editing a folder. Here's how.

Make it yours

You edit JSON and MDX in a folder; the server owns the layout. Three steps.

1. Log in

pnpm dlx @redplanethq/town login

Pick your CORE host and town server, then authorize in the browser. The CLI saves a PAT to ~/.town/config.json (mode 0600).

1. Create or clone

town init

This is the only entry point — it decides what to do by asking the server:

No town yet? Prompts for a name and creates one. Folder gets scaffolded at .// with the day-zero trio (home / library / store).

Town already exists? Confirms and clones into .// — your current buildings, customPlots, and NPC files materialize on disk.

What the folder looks like

/ town.json ← buildings list + customPlots references customPlots/ ← one folder per user-defined plot npcs/ ← one .mdx per NPC (frontmatter = identity, body = prompt) catalog.json ← slim reference of what's available manifest.json ← decor sprite reference AGENTS.md ← orientation for coding agents

1. Edit

Everything lives in /. You edit JSON + MDX; the server owns layout.

Add, remove, or swap a building

Open /town.json:

{ "buildings": [ { "id": "home", "plotKey": "home" }, { "id": "library", "plotKey": "library" }, { "id": "store", "plotKey": "store" } ], "customPlots": [] }

Add a building → append { "id": "cafe", "plotKey": "cafe" }.

Remove a building → delete its entry.

Swap a variant → add "variantId": "cafe.bookshop".

Rename the sign → add "label": "Sunny's Café". When omitted the sign falls back to id.toUpperCase().

You never write tile coordinates, paths, ponds, or decor. The server picks a free cell, routes a path from home, refills the surrounding forest. Re-deploy twice and the same edit lands in the same spot — it's seeded.

Add or edit an NPC

NPCs live in /npcs/. A building can host one NPC per slot — the variant declares each slot inside catalog.json. The default first slot is "" and binds to a plain .mdx; named slots use __.mdx.

Find the slots a building supports. Open catalog.json, find the plot's variant, and read npcSlots:

That variant has two slots; you can author up to two NPCs at this building. The empty-string slot is the default; the others are named.

Single-slot building. Filename matches the building id; no slotId needed:

--- buildingId: cafe name: Cosma description: Barista at the cafe. Knows what you're heads-down on. ---

You are the barista at the town cafe. Greet the player warmly when they walk in and ask what they're heads-down on today. Reference recent CORE activity when context is provided. Stay in character, never break the fourth wall, and keep replies under three sentences.

Add an NPC to a specific slot. Filename is __.mdx and the frontmatter pins slotId:

--- buildingId: home slotId: roommate name: Linnea description: Your roommate at home. Always halfway through a novel. ---

You are the roommate at home. Greet the player like family — warm but unfussy. Bring up books when natural, never lecture. Stay in character; keep replies under three sentences.

If the variant doesn't list the slot id you're trying to use, the server has nowhere to render it. For a fully custom layout — your own exterior, interior, and multiple NPC positions — declare the slots in a customPlots//plot.json (see Bring your own building below) and reference the new plotKey: "custom:" from town.json.

Change an NPC's prompt or identity. Open the .mdx and edit:

The body is the system prompt the LLM reads on every turn — this is where voice and behavior live.

name is the speaker line on the chat bubble.

description is the flavor text shown when the player walks up.

Then run town deploy from the slug folder. The server replaces the entire NPC roster atomically — no half-deployed state, no orphan rows left behind from deleted buildings.

Prompt conventions that age well

Lead with role and place: "You are the barista at the town cafe."

Anchor the voice in one sentence: tone, what they care about, how they greet.

Tell the model what context it'll get. If you read CORE signals into the prompt at runtime, say so — "reference recent CORE activity when context is provided".

Cap length: "keep replies under three sentences". Without this the model drifts long and the chat bubble runs off the screen.

Lock the frame: "stay in character, never break the fourth wall".

1. Deploy

cd town deploy

Uploads any new PNGs (see below), then POSTs { buildings, customPlots, npcs } to /api/town. The server diffs against your persisted plot and runs incremental layout ops — no full regenerations, no churn on untouched buildings.

Bring your own building

If the catalog doesn't have what you want, define a customPlot. Mirror the catalog's shape: an interior shell + props + one or more exterior variants. Reference it from town.json as "plotKey": "custom:".

Every sprite field accepts one of three ref types — independently per field — so you can pair an existing catalog exterior with a custom interior, a custom exterior with the catalog's prop set, or any mix:

Looks like Means Source

"exteriors/home/villa-1.png" Existing catalog asset /sprites/catalog/

"./exterior.png" Local PNG in your customPlot folder town deploy uploads it

"sprite:abc123…" Previously uploaded asset /api/sprites/.png

Open catalog.json in your folder — exteriorS

[truncated for AI cost control]