Data Center Playtest

Build, cable, and grow a living data center from the ground up. Start with bare floors, buy racks, servers, and switches, then physically place and stack your hardware the way you want. Run Ethernet between ports to shape your network by hand and watch data spring to life: every customer’s traffic appears as colored packet-balls rolling along your cables, revealing bottlenecks, idle links, and beautifully tuned throughput at a glance.

Customers arrive with app requirements and capacity targets. It’s your job to connect enough servers to each customer app, balance load across racks and switches, and keep the data flowing. As you successfully process customer data you earn money to expand, XP to unlock more capable devices, and reputation to attract bigger, more demanding clients. Hardware ages, too—servers and switches have end-of-life and can break—so design for uptime: keep services reachable even if devices on the path die, swap out failing gear, and build redundancy with servers that can use multiple network connections.

Tinker for perfect layouts or move fast to hit deadlines; either way, this is a tactile builder where every cable matters and every improvement is visible. No complex command lines—just the satisfying click of ports, the hum of stacked servers, and a vibrant river of packets proving your design works, even under failure.

Key features

• Hands-on data center building: buy racks, servers, and switches; stack hardware and route Ethernet by hand.
• Visual networking: see packets as colored balls per customer, making flow, congestion, and capacity instantly readable.
• Customer-driven goals: connect enough servers to each app to meet requirements and keep contracts running.
• Progression that rewards good design: process data to earn money, gain XP to unlock new devices, and build reputation to attract new customers.
• Reliability and maintenance: devices have lifespans and can fail—plan replacements, manage downtime risk, and keep services online.
• Redundancy that matters: give servers redundant connections and create alternate paths so traffic stays reachable when a switch or link dies.
• Evolve your layout: upgrade hardware, recable to remove bottlenecks, and scale your floor from scrappy beginnings to a bustling operation.
• Immediate feedback: every placement, failure, connection, and upgrade changes how packets move—optimize by watching the network breathe.
• Build it your way, wire it your way, and grow from a single rack to a reputation that attracts the biggest clients—all powered by a network you can literally see working, surviving hiccups and hardware end-of-life along the way.