Lincity

Lincity
Original author	I. J. Peters
Initial release	1995 (1995)
Stable release	2.14.2 / 23 September 2025 (2025-09-23)
Repository	{{URL|example.com|optional display text}}
Engine
Platform	Cross-platform
Successor	LinCity-NG
Type	Single-player City-building
License	GPLv2
Website	github.com/lincity-ng/lincity-ng

Lincity is a free and open-source construction and management simulation game, which puts the player in control of managing a city's socio-economy, similar in concept to SimCity. The player can develop a city by buying appropriate buildings, services and infrastructure. Its name is both a Linux reference and a play on the title of the original city-building game, SimCity, and it was released under the GNU General Public License v2.

Gameplay

A screenshot of the original Lincity, showing the top-down gameplay

Lincity features complex 2D and top-down gameplay.

The simulation considers population, employment, basic water management and ecology, goods (availability and production), raw materials (ore, steel, coal), services (education, health, fire protection, leisures), energy (electricity and charcoal, coal with finite reserves, solar and wind power) and other constraints such as finance, pollution and transports. The player has to take care of population growth and various socio-economic balances.

Lincity can be won in two ways: reaching sustainable development, or evacuating the entire population with spacecraft. The Lincity homepage has a Hall of Fame, listing players who have succeeded in one of these two goals.

History

Lincity was created around 1995 as SimCity clone for Linux by I. J. Peters and hosted on SourceForge in 2001. Lincity was originally designed for Linux, but was ported later to Microsoft Windows, BeOS, OS/2, AmigaOS 4, and other operating systems. Mac OS X is supported when compiled from source code using GCC and run using X11.app. It uses SVGALib or X11 as its graphics interface API on Unix systems. As Lincity does software rendering it requires no 3D graphics card and also has very low demands on other computing resources, e.g. much memory or a fast processor. Since 1999 there have been only minor changes to Lincity; the last update was in August 2004.

Critical reception

In 2000, a CNN article on Linux games highlighted Lincity's sophistication. It was The Linux Game Tome Game of The Month for January 2005. Lincity was 2008 a featured freeware title on 1up.com. The Washington Post featured Lincity in 2009.

Successor

LinCity-NG
Stable release	2.11.1 / 19 July 2024 (2024-07-19)
Repository	{{URL|example.com|optional display text}}
Engine
License	GPLv2
Website	https://github.com/lincity-ng/lincity-ng/

In 2005 significant development continued with the fork LinCity-NG, which was later transferred to Google Code and then to GitHub. Lincity-NG uses SDL2 and OpenGL, and features an isometric view, based on SimCity 3000, and graphics which resemble SimCity 3000's.

See also

• List of open source games
• Simutrans
• OpenTTD
• OpenCity
• Micropolis

External links

• Lincity, at SourceForge
• Lincity-NG Source, at GitHub (mirror)
• Lincity-NG downloads (alternate)