Breaking ground on the desert
Why Level 1 is a sandbox, what the $40M goal really measures, and how we tuned the opening build so your first cluster funds your second.
Welcome to the first entry in the Trillionaire: GPU Tycoon dev log. We want this space to be honest about how the simulation is put together - the numbers, the trade-offs, and the times we got it wrong before we got it right.
The desert is a sandbox, on purpose
Level 1 has exactly one soft goal: grow cumulative earnings to $40M to found The Diggy Hole Co. and unlock The North. There is no deadline. We tried a timed version early on and it fought the fantasy - a tycoon game should let you sit back and watch the racks hum, not panic at a clock.
Reaching $40M wins the run. Falling to insolvency ends it. Everything in between is yours to shape.
“Cumulative earned” is gross, not profit
A subtle but important call: the GPU-Gen unlock metric is gross contract revenue collected, not profit and not net worth. It rewards doing business - keeping GPUs busy under contract - rather than hoarding cash. You unlock the Hawk H200 at $1.2M earned whether or not you spent it all keeping the lights on.
The opening build
You start with $6.0M. The opening build - Uptime Tier II, one Hawk H100 cluster of 32 GPUs - costs $4.0M, leaving a $2.0M buffer. Pay is balanced so a fully-contracted opening cluster funds a second cluster in roughly five weeks of game time. That five-week number is the heartbeat of the whole economy; almost every other figure was tuned around it.
More soon - next time, the cooling model and why the desert wants to kill your uptime.