How it works
Each ant follows three simple rules and nothing else. It smells with three sensors — left, center, right — and turns toward the strongest scent. An ant without food follows food-scent and drips home-scent behind it as it walks. An ant carrying food follows home-scent back to the nest and drips food-scent behind it. The nest always smells strongly of home, and all scents slowly fade and spread. No ant has a plan and no ant talks to another — the highways, the foraging parties, the way a whole colony pivots to a fresh find all emerge from those rules.
Ants come in castes. Scouts are fast, roam far, and lay faint trails when they stumble on food. Workers follow the strong trails and haul food home. Soldiers never forage — they patrol around the nest and attack rival ants on sight, though every fight risks the soldier’s own life. The legend at the top-right of the field shows each caste at a glance; carriers glow white-hot at the core.
Each nest is a mound of earth: speckled soil, a raised crater rim around a dark entrance, scattered pebbles, and a small pennant in the colony’s color — the only bright mark, so the mounds read as ground, not neon. Faint stippled earth fades out around each one, marking its territory. The small label gives name and live population. Deep in the entrance glows the queen. Delivered food goes into her store. She burns a little per ant every moment to keep the colony alive, and spends food to hatch new ants while the store is healthy. If it runs dry, ants begin to starve — and a colony left with no ants and no food dies, its mound going dark and its pennant gray.
The year turns through four seasons, about a minute each — watch the marker at the top of the field. Spring doubles the wild food that appears on its own. Summer bakes the scent-highways away half again as fast. Autumn thins new growth to a trickle. Winter stops it entirely and slows every ant with cold — while the queen’s hunger never pauses. Spring and autumn bring rain: a single storm washes every scent field half away, so highways built for weeks can vanish in an afternoon.
Winter makes thieves. When the cold bites and a queen’s store falls below 25, her soldiers turn raider: up to three march on the nearest rival mound, steal 8 food from its store, and run home. The return trip crosses patrolled ground, and defenders fight raiders with the usual deadly odds. Inspect a raider mid-march and the card tells you whose nest it is after.
Watching it. Time runs at ¼× by default so you can actually follow a foraging trip, a fight, a haul home — crank it to 4× when you want colony-scale drama. The Trails toggle draws faint fading ribbons behind food carriers, so foraging highways materialize without shouting. Heat turns the scent field into a foraging-intensity heatmap, hiding colony colors so you see pure traffic. Pick the Inspect brush and tap any ant: the camera follows it and the card tells you its caste, its current job, its age, and how many hauls it has made. Tap empty ground or press Esc to release.
The minimap (bottom-right) keeps you oriented, with a white frame showing your current view. The legend (top-right) reads the castes at a glance.
The Food switch decides whether new clusters appear on their own. Regrows runs the ecosystem forever; Finite makes the world what you scatter — colonies can boom, then starve out. Tap to drop food, drag with the wall brush to reshape the world, and watch what happens.