The Street

Terminal-first social world inspired by Snow Crash. Walk the ring, chat by proximity, buy rooms, and ride the monorail. The MVP is a Rust WebSocket relay with a TUI client.

What it is

• A single authoritative relay server (no federation).
• An ASCII world: a ring-shaped street, rooms behind doors, and a fast monorail.
• A local-chat experience: talk to nearby players or whisper at close range.
• An economy prototype with mock XMR balances behind a wallet interface.

Tech at a glance

• Rust workspace with separate crates for client, relay, protocol, world, and shared common types.
• WebSocket relay that owns world state and persists data on the server.
• TUI client for rendering, input, and network messaging.
• Signed client actions using a persistent keypair (ed25519).
• Tor/SOCKS5 support (optional for dev).

Quick start (dev)

1. Start the relay:

cargo run -p street-relay -- --config config/relay.toml

2. Start the client:

cargo run -p street-client -- --config config/client.toml

3. Optional second local client:

cargo run -p street-client -- --config config/client2.toml

Configuration

• Relay config: config/relay.toml
• Client config: config/client.toml
• Client identity key: config/identity.key (auto-generated on first run)

Running the client without --config will create config/client.toml and a new identity key using the default relay ws://89.125.209.155:9001.

For multiple local clients, each needs a unique identity_key_path. Use config/client2.toml as a template.

Controls

• Move: arrow keys or WASD
• Input: press / for commands, Enter to type chat, Tab to cycle chat modes
• Info: press i to cycle info panels
• Quit: Esc or Ctrl+Q

Commands

• Chat: /say <msg>, /whisper <user> <msg>
• Presence: /who
• Rooms: /buy, /room_name <name>, /door_color <color>, /access <open|whitelist|blacklist> [user|pubkey...], /access show
• Identity: /claim_name <name>
• Economy: /pay <user> <amount>, /balance, /faucet [amount]
• Monorail: /board <north|east|south|west>, /depart <north|east|south|west>
• Help: /help, /exit

World model (MVP)

• The street is an infinite ASCII ring with doors every few columns.
• Rooms are separate maps with ownership and access controls.
• The monorail runs through the center of the street; stations are marked with M.
• Movement is grid-based with wall collisions.

Networking

• Relay is a WebSocket server; the client connects via relay_url.
• Tor/SOCKS5 can be enabled with tor_enabled = true and socks5_proxy.
• For LAN play, bind the relay to 0.0.0.0:9001 and point clients at your IP.

Project layout

• crates/common: shared types, config, crypto helpers
• crates/protocol: message types, serialization, signature verification
• crates/world: map generation, physics, doors
• crates/wallet: wallet trait and mock implementation
• crates/relay: WebSocket server, authoritative state, persistence
• crates/client: TUI, input handling, networking, rendering

Notes

• The wallet and XMR integration are mocked in the MVP.
• The relay never stores private keys.

Docs

• Protocol: docs/PROTOCOL.md
• Data model: docs/DATA_MODEL.md
• Workspace: docs/WORKSPACE.md