A new engine for a classic city builder. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and in your web browser. It uses the game files from your own copy of Banished.
Citizens at the market of a town of 116 people, and the same town from autumn to spring at the highest speed. Un-Banished recorded both videos itself, without a window.
Banished is a city-building game by Shining Rock Software, released in February 2014. It runs only on Windows. Its last version is 1.0.7.
Un-Banished is a reimplementation of the game's engine in Rust. It reads the data files of an installed copy of Banished and runs the game on Windows, macOS, Linux and in web browsers. The goal is identical behaviour: the same maps, rules, numbers, timings and save files. Where Un-Banished behaves differently from the original, this is treated as a bug.
Un-Banished contains no code, art, sound or text from the original game. A copy of Banished is required, from Steam or GOG.
We did not have the source code of Banished. We had only the finished program. Ghidra turned the program's machine code into readable pseudocode. An AI agent read it, wrote down what each part does, and ran the original functions in an emulator to get exact numbers. Then it wrote new code in Rust from those notes, and tested the new code against the original.
1Read the data files
The .pkg packages and their formats
2Decompile
Ghidra turns machine code into pseudocode
3Trace
Understand one function and write it down in plain words
4Measure
Run the original function in an emulator
5Rebuild in Rust
New code from the notes, citing the original function
6Check
Tests against the emulator, saves and screenshots
7Write down, commit
Documents, the checklist, and one commit per piece
Does not match?
The work goes back to step 3, Trace, until the check passes.
Every part of the game went through this loop.
There are two ways to play. In the browser, you only need the four game files. On the desktop, you build Un-Banished once with Rust, which takes about ten minutes.
Play in your browser · Set it up on your computer · See the status
