Introduction

ascii-things is a collection of small artificial-life simulations drawn as glyphs on a canvas: a full marine Lagoon, a shark tank, a robot factory floor, a jellyfish bloom, a robot dog test yard, and ambient worlds for starlings, fireflies, ants, koi, city traffic, and servers. Each one runs on its own rules, respects reduced motion, and ships with no runtime dependencies.

Same seed and size produce the same scene. Different palette changes the ink, not the behavior. One canvas is the whole surface.

AbyssnightPaperdayNeonloudMonoquiet

PauseCalm off

LIVE

CELLS

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UNITS

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STATE

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FPS

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Click to throw the ball, or type a command below.

Tell the dog what to fetch

›Throw

yard@04 · awaiting commandEnter submits · Click to throw the ball, or type a command below.

Seed 7, columns 110, and speed 1 are fixed in this demo. The palette and calm controls update the running engine without rebuilding the world.

Start here

InstallationAdd the package, choose a subpath, and import the optional UI stylesheet.

QuickstartThe smallest React, vanilla, and plain HTML examples that actually run.

ReactLive props, remount rules, sizing, and the client-component contract.

Integrationsshadcn/ui, Tailwind, Next.js, Astro, and framework-free recipes.

API referenceEvery option, default, event, statistic, and engine method in one table.

What you get

• Every scene, one shape. palette, seed, speed, columns, maxCells, maxDpr, calm, interactive, label, and onEvent behave the same everywhere.
• Framework-ready adapters. React components from ascii-things/react, vanilla create* factories from scene subpaths, and <ascii-*> custom elements.
• An optional UI layer. ascii-things/ui adds a framed stage, command input, live readout, palette tabs, and a full dog-hero recipe.
• Calm defaults. Decorative canvases are hidden from assistive technology unless you pass label. Reduced motion settles the world to a still frame. Off-screen scenes pause.

Version

Release candidate

This site tracks main. The current candidate is 1.0.0-rc.0; it is not on npm yet. The public API is frozen for 1.0, including paused, aspectRatio, onReady, fontFamily, palette="auto", adaptive quality, and the uniform trigger() action. Build from the repository or install the packed tarball until the release is published.

The scenes

Scene	What it does	Import
Lagoon	A full-canvas marine family: turtle, manta, seahorse, dolphin, hammerhead, and tang.	ascii-things/lagoon
Shark tank	Fish school and flee; sharks hunt, splash, and settle.	ascii-things/sharks
Robot floor	Robots patrol, scan, haul, queue for a dock, and recharge.	ascii-things/robots
Jellyfish bloom	Jellies pulse on a current, trail tentacles, and ring on contraction.	ascii-things/jellyfish
Robot dog	A quadruped trots, sniffs, sits, fetches a ball, and docks.	ascii-things/dog
Starlings	A murmuration folds around a predator and scatters.	ascii-things/starlings
Fireflies	A dusk meadow of fireflies blinks, flares, and settles.	ascii-things/fireflies
Ants	A colony forages pheromone trails and carries crumbs home.	ascii-things/ants
Koi	A koi pond with lily pads, ripples, and food.	ascii-things/koi
City	A night grid of traffic and lit windows.	ascii-things/city
Servers	A rack room of blinking LEDs and traveling packets.	ascii-things/servers

Read the scene overview for the shared model, or open any scene from there.