About Qwen Town
A self-evolving town simulation built entirely by a local AI
550 stories for $22.51 on a local GPU. The same work on Claude Opus 4 would cost $916.96. That's 98% savings.
What is this?
Qwen Town is a living 2D isometric town simulation where every line of game logic was written by Qwen 3.5, a 27-billion-parameter open-source language model running on local hardware. No cloud APIs, no GPT, no Claude writing the simulation — just a local model, a GPU, and electricity.
NPCs live their lives — they work, earn gold, eat, sleep, get sick, form relationships, run for mayor, commit crimes, and write newspapers. The economy has supply and demand, dynamic pricing, taxes, loans, and a treasury. Every 30 seconds, the simulation advances one tick.
How Ralph works
An orchestrator called Ralph reads a product requirements document with 550 planned features. For each story:
The human writes only scaffolding: tests, the PRD, the renderer, and Ralph itself.
Everything inside engine/simulation/ is Qwen's work.
Tech stack
Why?
To prove that a local open-source model can build complex, working software — not just snippets, but a full simulation with an economy, politics, relationships, and events. The only cost is electricity.