Silicon Pirates Beta 3 Gameplay: Full Walkthrough Video

Three gameplay videos of Silicon Pirates, the browser homelab and server rack simulator I've been building all year, all recorded from the Beta 3 development build. The first is a 50-second promo cut from this week's footage of the tier-three Machine Room. The second is a 56-second cut for people who want the idea fast. The third is the full three-and-a-half-minute walkthrough with timestamps, if you want to see how the rack, the workbench and the new terminal actually fit together.

One honest note before you press play: Beta 3 is not public yet. The build you can play right now at sp.silicon-pirates.com is Beta 2, which already has the rack, the power and thermal model, cabling, contracts and raids. Beta 3 is the next step: the new room, the workbench, the terminal shell and the grind loop you see below. It lands on the same URL when it ships.

The Beta 3 promo (50 seconds)

This is the newest footage: a maxed-out Machine Room (tier three of three, two racks, four circuits) instead of the Starter Den, so you see what the game looks like once you've been playing for a while. Watch for the second rack with its green cable runs, the mining frame opened on the workbench, the wall patch panel, and the "room restyled" flash when the customize panel repaints the whole room.

The 56-second version

This is the cut I posted to Reddit. It opens on the Starter Den, the tier-one room every new player gets, and goes straight into rack focus: a 12U rack with an edge router, an 8-port switch, a crypto rig, a NAS, a firewall and a PDU, all wired with cables you ran yourself. Then the camera drops onto the workbench, where a 2U NAS is open with its drive bays glowing, and finally into the terminal, the part of Beta 3 I'm most excited about.

The full walkthrough (3:43)

Timestamps, so you can jump to the part you care about. Each link seeks the video above.

• 0:00 The Starter Den. Room view, the neon sign, the terminal feed on the right.
• 0:06 RACK-01 in rack focus. Every device shows its power draw and status; the cables are the ones you ran.
• 0:24 The workbench. A 2U NAS is pulled from the rack and opened: an 8-bay controller, four 8 TB drives, and the parts you could swap in.
• 0:54 The SP3 bootleg shell. rackctl status reports RACK-01 online, 20 W, 32 °C, two days of uptime. hack --list says "access denied (soon)", and it means it.
• 1:33 Back in the room. The grind panel with daily and weekly goals, which is how Beta 3 gives you a reason to come back tomorrow.
• 2:00 The vendor. Every device you can buy, with its price, from a free PDU to a crypto rig.
• 2:20 Rack focus again, with the UPS 300 on standby at 100%.
• 2:42 Workbench, second visit: a 1U firewall and the parts on hand for it.
• 3:20 The firewall goes into the rack and comes online. Final rack state.

What you're actually looking at

If you've never seen the game, the short version: Silicon Pirates is a homelab simulator you play in a browser tab. No download, no signup. You get a room and an empty rack. You buy devices, slot them in, run power from a PDU, run network cables from the router to the switch to everything else, and then keep the whole thing alive. Power draw is real. Heat is real. A NAS with no share configured earns nothing, and a crypto rig that's wired to a switch that isn't wired to the router just sits there being expensive.

The three views you see the camera swapping between are the whole interface:

• Room view is the wide shot. The rack, the desk, the neon sign, and the terminal feed where the game and other players talk to you.
• Rack view is where you build. Each U shows what's in it, whether it's online, and how many watts it's pulling. Click a port, click another port, and you've run a cable.
• Device view is the workbench. Pull a device out, open the chassis, see what's installed, and swap parts.

What's new in Beta 3

Most of what's in these videos is Beta 3 work that isn't public yet:

• The terminal. A real shell inside the game. Right now it reports on your rack. The hacking commands are stubbed with "access denied (soon)" because the hacking update is what the shell is for, and I'd rather ship the shell first than ship both half-done.
• The workbench. Devices are no longer black boxes with a wattage. Open a NAS and you'll find a controller and drives. Open a firewall and you'll find the parts that make it a firewall.
• The grind panel. Daily and weekly goals with a streak. The August devlog explains why day-two retention became the priority; this is the Beta 3 answer.
• Rooms with tiers. The Starter Den is tier one of three. Later rooms have more circuits and more rack space.

If you want the engineering side of the same game, there's a devlog on how the rack model handles DHCP faults and thermal profiles and one on the mining rig payout bug that took a month to find. The original announcement, with the first terminal videos, is here.

Play it

The current build is free and runs in any modern browser, desktop or phone: play Silicon Pirates at sp.silicon-pirates.com. The main site, with the player guide and the changelog, is at silicon-pirates.com. When Beta 3 ships I'll post the release notes here, and the videos above will stop being a preview.