Trash Pandas to Mars

Trash Pandas to Mars is a simulation game you can play free in your browser — no download, no account, nothing to install. If you came looking for Base Building, this is built in that mould. Opus 5 wrote the code; the prompt that produced it is on this page. It works on a phone as well as a desktop.

About Trash Pandas to Mars

Something large is coming, and it arrives in twenty years. Twelve million raccoons live on Earth.
You run the programme that moves them.

Building is isometric and hands-on. Power is a live balance: when supply falls short of draw, every
machine slows down together instead of switching off.

You fly five things, and only five, and you have to build each one first — no rocket exists until
the raccoons have rolled the steel, cast the engines and stacked it in a bay. First orbit, first
booster catch, first ship landing, first Mars landing, first orbital refuel: each a side-on launch
with real physics. Orbit is sideways speed, not height, and holding the throttle straight up will
not get you there. The vehicle is the one your base can actually build, so an early attempt is a
marginal rocket and a patient one is not. How well you fly each becomes the permanent efficiency
of every automated flight after it: a sloppy catch means a fleet that keeps dropping boosters.

Earth and Mars only line up every twenty-six months. Nine windows, ninety days each. Between them
you build ships and boosters, catch them and build more, because a booster that flies once is a
booster wasted — and you split every launch between passengers and the cargo the colony needs to
survive them.

The clock never stops. When it runs out you get one number: how many made it.

How was Trash Pandas to Mars made?

Creator

Space Traveler

Model

Opus 5Anthropic

Effort

High

Cost to build

$101.00

Tokens used

5,720,000

Build time

855 min

On phones

plays on mobile

The prompt behind Trash Pandas to Mars

Make another game — but do not use any references and do not look at how my previous games were
built. Start from a blank sheet. A space game about colonising Mars. Not realistic or
mega-detailed — cute, in the clean mobile-strategy drawing style, sleek simple objects. Animals
instead of humans, maybe raccoons. Multi-step, with progression. It is up to your judgement and
design skills; I want to see how good a game you can make from a vague prompt. Build until it is a
finished, verified, playable version you are proud of.

Then, after playing it: the scientists discover a huge object moving towards Earth, and in twenty
years all of humanity is evaporated. The only option is to move everyone to Mars. The goal is not
to build one spaceship — it is to build a whole starbase, achieve rocket reusability, build engines,
build enough engines to move millions of raccoons off Earth. Show them building the base on Mars.
Move as many as possible before Earth collapses.

And no walls of text. If people have to read something to understand how it plays, we are not doing
a good enough job — animate it, use icons. More than two sentences, think again.

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Version 2.1 · updated 2026-09-07

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