The problem
Warframe has thousands of items and a damage formula with dozens of multipliers that interact. Players plan builds in spreadsheets or in calculators that hide their maths, go stale after each update and disagree with each other. I wanted one tool where every number can be traced back to its source and to the game version it came from.
What I built
A Next.js 16 app on a Turborepo monorepo, backed by four pure packages: game-data fetches, parses and validates the game's data per version; loadout holds the build model and its rules (capacity, polarities, conflicts); calc is the damage engine; api-schema is the API contract as zod schemas. The site browses every warframe, weapon, companion and mod, builds a full loadout or a single item, and simulates weapon and ability damage. A Fastify and Drizzle API on Postgres adds sign-in through Discord, Google or Steam, account sync, builds published against a game version, likes, comments and tier list votes. The home header is my own three.js drawing, not a game asset.
Technical challenges
- Sources disagree. The pipeline merges the game's public export, a community item database and the wiki's data modules. Every conflict goes into a written ledger: what disagrees, what ships meanwhile and how to settle it.
- Names are not unique. Three different mods are called "Serration", so the game's internal id is the only key, everywhere.
- Order matters. Mods change damage in ways that depend on each other. Each mod is a file of "lines" run in one ordered fold, which is what lets a breakdown show the base value beside the configured one, step by step.
- Formulas as data. The wiki's ability calculators are written in their own small language, so I ported its interpreter to TypeScript instead of copying hundreds of formulas by hand.
Outcome
Simaris Labs opened to the public on November 10, 2026, at simarislabs.com (opens in a new tab), with the web app and the API running as separate services on Railway. Nine roadmap phases shipped first, from the data platform to three separate builders (ground, Archwing and Necramech, Railjack). The data tracks game version 44.1.4.1, and more than 160 test files guard the parsers and formulas.
