A living pixel-art pond that runs on its own. Its animals grow, breed, hunt and evolve, and some are steered by live brains (a language model, a fruit-fly connectome, a zebrafish circuit) that learn as they go. Feed it and build it, and it wears deeper, past the twilight and the abyss to stranger depths, with more than two hundred kinds of creature and fifty plants to find.
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A pixel-art pond that runs in your browser. Every animal has its own genes, life and temper: they grow, hunt, breed, fight and change on their own.
Feed what arrives, plant and build, and spend the essence and pearls your pond earns on its animals and its world. Click any animal to see its life, genes and family. The pond deepens as it lives, and deeper water brings stranger things.
No. Your pond saves in this browser and gets its own link. Signing in with Discord keeps your ponds in an account, so you can carry on from any browser.
Anyone with its link can look around, but only you can change it. Once it has 50 points it is listed on the leaderboard, unless you untick "Show my pond on the leaderboard" in its score panel.
Ponds earn points as things happen in them: rare animals, new generations, animals growing well. High scores ranks listed ponds by points; the in-game leaderboard ranks them by depth first.
Any animal can be awakened, up to five per pond. A brain then steers it instead of its instincts. Several times a second the game turns what the animal senses into numbers: food and prey around it, danger, its own kind, its hunger, its rival, and what it has learned about each species. It sends those to the brain it was given, and the game carries out the answer. The animal swims, hunts, flees or fights by the pond's own rules, so a brain can only choose among real options.
Jev is a language model. Every half minute or so it reads a short description of the encounter, with each option and its learned worth and risk, and picks a goal. Fly Brain runs the whole FlyWire fruit-fly connectome (about 139,000 neurons and 54 million synapses) as a spiking network. The senses become signals into its taste, smell and touch neurons, and the firing of its descending neurons (walk, turn, feed, escape) becomes the movement. Fish Brain runs a measured circuit from a larval zebrafish hindbrain with modelled dynamics. Prey and danger in sixteen directions drive its turning and forward populations about five times a second; it is not a whole fish brain. Jev + Fish lets Jev choose the goal and Fish Brain do the steering.
On top of each brain sits a learning layer. Food, kills, won and lost fights, and close calls reward or punish whatever it was paying attention to, and that slowly changes how strongly it senses each thing. It also remembers which species were worth chasing and which hurt. Traits and the eldritch mark give it a drive to pick fights. The networks themselves aren't retrained: what changes is how the animal weighs the world.
The pond rests while it is closed and carries on when you come back. A hatchery's auto-feeder keeps working for up to 8 hours.
A language model. About every 30 seconds per animal it reads the encounter: the animal, its hunger, what's near and how big, and for each species what it has learned it's worth, what it costs and how often it has tried. It picks one of the options the pond allows: forage, hunt, stalk, hunt as a pack, fight, shelter, flee, explore, rest. The server checks the choice against that list before the animal acts on it.
The FlyWire adult fruit-fly connectome, every mapped neuron (about 139,000) and their 54 million synapses, run as a leaky integrate-and-fire network on a compiled spike engine. The animal's senses set the firing of its sensory neurons: sugar for food, bitter, odour, touch and danger. After 50 ms of simulated time, the firing rates of its descending neurons (forward, turning left and right, feeding, escape, reverse, grooming) become the move. About every two seconds per animal.
Fish1: a circuit measured from a larval zebrafish hindbrain, with modelled neuron dynamics. Prey, danger and kin in sixteen directions around the animal feed its input layer; populations called Class I and II pass that on to turning and forward-swimming outputs, with startle and feeding reflexes. Left turn, right turn and thrust come back about five times a second. It is one circuit, not a whole fish brain.
Every brain gets six sensed channels through gains that start at 1. For four seconds after each sense, a trace remembers what the animal was approaching. A meal (+0.25), a kill (+0.6), a won fight (+0.4), a lost one (−0.5) or a close call with danger (−0.2) strengthens or weakens those gains, within ×0.5 to ×2. Alongside, it keeps a worth and risk for each kind of prey (bigger prey feeds more but may fight back) and a feeling about each species, and climbs from forager to pack hunter as it gains experience. All of this is saved with the pond.
Sign in with Discord to keep your ponds in your account, carry on from any browser, and put your name on the leaderboard if you like.
Choose an action, then click the pond. + pins it below.
Place a structure in the pond. Click it for details; use the Net to remove it.
Awaken any creature from its card. Up to five per pond.