RuneScape Bench: MMOs for Agents
Come to Localhost at the Recurse Center!
Localhost is a series of technical talks in NYC given by members of the Recurse Center community. For every event, we set aside seats for the public.
🗡️🛡️ Max Bittker on RS-sdk:
Runescape is a low fidelity simulation of a medieval economy, based on grinding repetitive actions. What happens to the game if you automate it?
RS-sdk is a 2026 project to turn an open source implementation of the game, LostCity, into a testbed for new experiments. It taught me about how to design libraries for coding agents, how to build and think about evals and the world of LLM post-training.
There were also lessons in game design, simulated economics, and has even been a testbed for exploring the future of multi-agent systems, when agents are tasked with trading and trusting one another in a shared world.
Excited to share some of these stories and talk about weird new ways to play my favorite old game!
Max Bittker is a game designer and a founding member of Websim — he's built games such as Sandspiel and Orb.farm, and teaches a course on building and designing creative tools at NYU ITP. Max researches multi-agent systems and is the creator of rs-sdk and runebench.
Max is a 2016 Recurse Center alum.
Doors open and refreshments will be available at 6:30 pm. The talk will begin at 7:00 pm, with a few minutes reserved at the end for Q+A.
This event is in-person only. A recording of the talk will be made available on the Recurse Center YouTube channel.
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Poster designed by Eva Khoury.