Root Cause

DISCORD is live! Joint the discussion and help play testing.
https://discord.gg/uVgtFhjv

Think you can build an AI datacenter from scratch and keep it running? Root Cause is a datacenter management sim built for people who enjoy building and working with infrastructure.

  Start with a handful of old servers in your Uncle Joe's old lab. Deploy servers, switches, PDUs, and HVAC. Cable your network, stand up services, and keep the lights on when things break — because things will break.

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  What you're managing:

  - Power distribution with A/B feed redundancy

  - Thermal zones and cooling economics

  - CLOS network fabric (leaf-spine topology)

  - Service deployment with HA levels and dependency chains

  - WAN circuits with SLA uptime tracking

  - Incident response through a real ticketing system

  How you progress:

  - Start in a home lab, expand to a full campus with multiple facilities

  - Unlock equipment tiers as you level up

  - Research technologies across networking, virtualization, security, and storage

  - Deploy higher-margin services as your infrastructure matures

  - CHIP, your AI ops assistant, gains capabilities as you give it more compute

  

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  Alpha build — core simulation is solid, placeholder art to discover game play. You're in early.

  What's in the alpha:

  - Full progression from home lab to multi-facility campus

  - 11-factor income model (thermal, network architecture, redundancy, cooling efficiency, and more)

  - CHIP AI assistant with real local agentic responses and game-aware tools. No internet access required for gameplay!

  - Outage and incident response system with cascading failures

  - Silent threat system (crypto miners, performance drains, insider threats)

  - Save/load with autosave

  Coming soon:

  - New technology trees — liquid cooling, GPU clusters, edge compute, and more

  - Deeper equipment progression with specialized hardware tiers

  - Deeper story integration for mid and late game equipment and skills

  There's a story here. It's just getting started

  Controls: Mouse + keyboard. WASD on campus, mouse in facilities

  Platform: Windows and MacOS 

  Built by one person who spent too many hours on a 3am P1, freezing while consoled-in to a cold-isle server rack, while you freeze in July  

DISCORD is live! Joint the discussion and play testing.