Over the past five years, numerical simulations of galaxy formation have quietly passed a key milestone. The latest cosmological simulations are now able to resolve the sites of star formation and the impact of individual stellar feedback events. In this talk, I explain how this has led to a new level of realism that makes simulations more predictive. I present the latest results from the "EDGE" simulation project (with a spatial resolution of ~3pc), focussed on modelling the very smallest stellar systems in the Universe. I show how realistic dwarf galaxies and dense star clusters - globular clusters and nuclear star clusters - naturally emerge in EDGE. I present a new semi-empirical tool for galaxy formation, DarkLight, that allows us to scale up the results from a small number of high resolution EDGE simulations to full galaxy populations. And, I present the testable predictions that our EDGE simulations make for new objects that should be found in up-coming surveys. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of where the field is heading next.