Lenia
A little artificial life. Simple rules, living patterns, and no two runs quite alike.
The living field above is the same simulation you arrived with. Play, pause, or step through its evolution.
Appearance controls
Start the simulation to enable these controls.
Small rules. Strange life.
Lenia is a continuous cellular automaton. Each cell responds to its neighbors through a Gaussian-ring kernel and a growth function. Together, those local interactions create patterns that move, merge, and disappear.
This version runs in Rust and WebAssembly, with an ASCII renderer. It began as the backdrop for this site; now it has a space of its own.
Press Start simulation to load the engine. Pause freezes it, Step advances one generation, and Reseed starts again. Open Appearance controls to change the glyphs, palette, noise, and bloom. Simulation rules stay fixed; these controls change the rendering.
The simulation pauses when you leave the tab. If your device prefers reduced motion, it starts paused so you can explore one step at a time.