
Design. Detonate. Survive. As the Chief Engineer of the Kurchatov Institute, you must design atomic devices to satisfy the demands of the State. A hardcore physics-based puzzle game simulating hydrodynamics, neutron transport, and thermonuclear fusion.
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
About
NUCLEAR DESIGN BUREAU is a hardcore sandbox engineering game where you design and test nuclear devices.
You are the Chief Engineer of a secret Soviet design bureau. The State gives you a target and a warehouse full of dangerous materials. In some directives, your available materials are limited. Your task is simple: build a device that gets the job done.
THIS IS A PROTOTYPE, NOT A FINISHED GAME. THERE WILL BE BUGS, MISSING OR BROKEN FEATURES, AND BIG CHANGES COMING.
HOW IT WORKS
- Receive Directive: Read technical mission requirements and constraints, including material limits in specific directives.
- Design: Paint materials directly onto the blueprint grid. Build your primary, casing, and supporting systems.
- Simulate: Hit the red button, run full detonation physics in real time, and watch the blast in the detonation viewer.
- Refine: If it fizzles, fails, or wastes material, iterate and improve.
CORE FEATURES
- Physics-Driven Simulation: Shockwaves, heat, radiation, and chain-reaction behavior are modeled in real time.
- Detonation Viewer: Observe detonations as they unfold, with live visual feedback on blast behavior.
- Campaign Directives: Structured mission progression with technical goals and constraints.
- Sandbox Mode: Unlimited experimentation with full design freedom.
- Iterative Engineering Loop: Build, test, diagnose, and optimize.
EARLY ACCESS STATUS (CURRENT BUILD)
The current Early Access build is fully playable and includes the core gameplay loop:
- Design -> Simulate -> Refine
- Sandbox mode
- Campaign directives
- Save/load systems with ongoing stability improvements
This is an active development build. Expect balance changes, physics upgrades, and campaign iteration during Early Access.
EARLY ACCESS ROADMAP (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
Physics and Simulation
- More realistic detonation viewer (better shockwaves, 3D-style presentation, damage radius + thermal radiation modeling, destructible buildings/targets)
- Smaller grid mode for higher realism
- Improved compression physics
- Levitated pit physics
- Fission boosting with D-T gas
Campaign and Content
- Rebuild and expand campaign around updated grid, physics, and destruction systems
- Many more directives/missions
- Voiced campaign
- Additional bomb concepts (high-radiation designs, clean bombs, neutron bombs)
- More advanced materials
Presentation and Audio
- More music tracks
Community and Meta
- Public leaderboard
DEVELOPMENT APPROACH
Early Access is where this game gets shaped in public. Player feedback will guide balancing, campaign pacing, clarity, and polish as we move toward full release.
"The atom is not a soldier, Comrade. It is a force of nature. We merely tell it where to go."
Genres
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English
Engagement
Reviews
Themes across 50 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
Annoyingly bad ui, buggy etc, but it's about what you expect with vibecode On the otherhand, as someone that enjoys making improvised explosives, the game catches onto me nicely, so it's worth dealing with It just wouldn't help you make anything nuclear or otherwise in 3d space
Great idea, was really interested in what it seemed to offer when I saw it on Youtube. But I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate it. Absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate it. Even basic gun designs are near impossible. You'll make a huge sphere of uranium but know what the problem is? Some small slug of uranium is going critical with tons less mass. But you can't tell that yet and it doesn't make sense, because when the game tells you the design failed due to starting critical it just says nothing about where that criticality is. Lucky you, don't you love guessing games? THEN it turns out your device is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fine, but the game applies RNG every time you press detonate and this ♥♥♥♥♥ you so royally that perfectly valid designs can randomly fail from RNG, and genuinely bad designs can slip past quite often because you just keep clicking detonate until the RNG doesn't start your bomb as critical. Edit: Since comments keep mentioning this: I am not criticising the way you start neutron activity, I understand to place a neutron generator. This is about how it auto-fails designs if the uranium starts at k >= 1.0 at the start, nearly unrelated to the neutron activity. The game randomly changes this fact every time you try to test so that there is zero reliability. Designing itself is a genuine pain. Lining things up proves tedious, and indicator lines like placing buildings in Anno 1800 would help immeasurably. Added bonus that the UI is highly customisable, but you can't read any of it due to tiny text and if you click anything it just resets the UI. If you even open the in-game manual it will reset all your UI customisations. So far I got to directive 1-4, where it was impossible to create the 5kt bomb and I could not make a non-failing bomb past 3kt. The info I need to work with the design is hidden and the RNG is infuriating to the point I would actively recommend avoiding it just because of that. Oh, and don't enter first person mode. It literally deletes your entire design.
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Hours played at review time, across 50 reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
A LOT of potential. This game has a lot of potential, and it really scratches the “design your own nuclear weapon” itch that NukeMap gave me. Game is very fun and easy to understand. The only thing that is a bit difficult to understand could be all the measurements, but even that is a stretch. It would be awesome if the developer(s) added a way to speed up time so that the chain reactions could be done faster, but otherwise this game is peak. 10/10 on the nuclear autism scale
Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
Finally I can cosplay as Robert Oppenheimer. I can already tell this neat little game is a nice intro to some aspects of nuclear physics. Now I just need to find a nuclear power plant simulator and my life is complete.
First!
This game is very fun but also very hard and sadly non-deterministic, especially with regard to starting with already critical mass, if you spam the detonate button enough times you can roll the correct random number and get past the warning
By far the most fun way to get put on a list. If you liked Children of a Dead Earth, this is the game you've been waiting for. Dev is awesome, communicates and releases fixes really fast.
The game still has performance issues but it's heading in the right direction.
Needs fine tuned bad, but its fun to make something and test it while you're doing other stuf
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