A living slime-mould ecosystem, modelled on Physarum polycephalum — the brainless organism that famously solves mazes and rebuilds rail maps. Tens of thousands of microscopic crawlers, each one of a few strains (colours), wander a dark field. Each leaves a faint glowing scent wherever it goes, and that scent slowly spreads and evaporates. Every veined network, membrane and pulsing front you see emerges from nothing but that feedback loop.
A crawler has no brain and no plan. Every step it simply:
What "smells strongest" is decided by the scent matrix below: how much each strain is drawn to — or repelled by — every strain's trail (including its own). Following your own scent builds roads; avoiding it spreads you thin. The grid is asymmetric, just like in Primordium, and that imbalance is what turns symmetry into life.
Every culture is generated from a 32-bit seed: copy it to save a colony or paste a friend's, then Load. Mutate nudges the rules; Evolve keeps mutating so the colony drifts on its own. Drag a matrix cell up/down to hand-tune one relationship, and drag the canvas to feed the slime a glowing lure (toggle to erase). The presets are hand-built starting points.
Toggle Audio (the a key) and the colony conducts a generative ambient
piece. The driver is the swarm's restlessness — how many crawlers are still searching and
turning. A confused, exploring culture makes the music busy, high and bright; as it settles into stable
veins the crawlers stop turning and the music falls sparse, low and calm. Pentatonic tuning means it
never hits a wrong note. All synthesised live with the Web Audio API — no files, no network.
space pause · r randomize · m mutate ·
e evolve · p palette · a sound ·
n reseed · h hide panel · i this panel
A single self-contained HTML file · no libraries, no network, no assets. Real-time agent-based slime simulation on a diffusing scent field. A companion to Primordium. Built with Claude.