My Data Center

well.. its your data center!

An idle tycoon game you play in your terminal over SSH. Start with $500, buy servers, and watch the income roll in as you grow from a budget VPS to an orbital cloud.

ssh play.ronakbuilds.tech

Website: https://ronakbuilds.tech/My-Data-Center/ (setup guide with copy-paste commands)

How to play

Connect (see Connecting below).
Enter a username. If it's new, you'll be asked to set a password and an account is created; otherwise log in with your password.

Use the main menu with keys 1–4:

Key	Action
1	Name your data center
2	Buy servers: type the server number and press Enter (empty Enter cancels)
3	View your infrastructure and per-server income (M to go back)
4	Save and exit

Every server you own earns money each second while you're connected. Each extra copy of the same server costs 15% more than the last, so spread out or save up for the next tier.

#	Server	Base cost	Income
1	Budget VPS	$100	$2/sec
2	Compute Node	$600	$14/sec
3	GPU Cluster	$3,000	$80/sec
4	AI Datacenter	$15,000	$450/sec
5	Quantum Farm	$80,000	$2,500/sec
6	Orbital Cloud	$400,000	$15,000/sec

Your progress (balance, name and servers) is saved automatically every second, so you can pick up where you left off next time you log in.

Connecting

The game is served at play.ronakbuilds.tech through a Cloudflare Tunnel, so you need cloudflared installed to connect. You only have to set this up once.

1. Install cloudflared

macOS: brew install cloudflared
Windows: winget install --id Cloudflare.cloudflared
Linux: download the package for your distro from https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/downloads/

2. Add this to your SSH config

The file is ~/.ssh/config (on Windows, C:\Users\<you>\.ssh\config). Create it if it doesn't exist.

Host play.ronakbuilds.tech
  ProxyCommand cloudflared access ssh --hostname %h

3. Connect

ssh play.ronakbuilds.tech

No SSH key or password is needed; the game has its own login. Use a terminal at least 80×24.

Troubleshooting

Permission denied (publickey): the SSH config entry from step 2 is missing or misspelled, so you reached the host machine instead of the game. Add it, then run ssh-keygen -R play.ronakbuilds.tech to forget the wrong host key and connect again.
remote error: tls: internal error: your computer has an old DNS record cached. On macOS, run sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder and try again.
cloudflared: command not found: cloudflared isn't installed or isn't on your PATH.
Garbled screen: make your terminal window bigger and reconnect.

How it works

File	Purpose
`game.py`	The curses game: login screen, menus, server shop and income loop
`database.py`	SQLite storage (`data.db`) for accounts (hashed passwords) and saved progress
`ssh_server.py`	A Paramiko SSH server on port 2222 that runs `game.py` in a pseudo-terminal for each connection

Each SSH connection gets its own game process, so players don't share state except through the database.

Running locally

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install paramiko
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f host_key -N ""   # one-time: the server's SSH host key
.venv/bin/python ssh_server.py

Then, in another terminal:

ssh -p 2222 localhost

Set GAME_HOST=127.0.0.1 to accept local connections only (the default is all interfaces).

You can also play without SSH by running python3 game.py directly.

Hosting

The live server runs on Hack Club Nest ([email protected]):

You will need to host on your own server / machine
ssh_server.py runs from ~/My-Data-Center with the project's .venv.
A Cloudflare Tunnel named play-game routes play.ronakbuilds.tech to ssh://localhost:2222. Its config is in ~/.cloudflared/config.yml.
~/start-game.sh starts the game server and tunnel in the background if they aren't already running. Run it after the container restarts.
Logs are written to server.log and tunnel.log in ~/My-Data-Center.

To deploy an update:

cd ~/My-Data-Center && git pull
pkill -f ssh_server.py; ~/start-game.sh