AYE.GG / LIVING COLONY SANDBOX
Build a colony. Earn food rewards. Upgrade your workers and defend the nest.
COLONY OBJECTIVE 1 / 6
Complete objectives in order and claim each food reward once per scene. Upgrades cost 20 then 40 stored food: leave food for the queen! Each has two ranks. The sandbox stays freely editable; objectives are optional and start over with a fresh habitat.
Start with Pan camera to drag around your colony. Choose Inspect colony and tap an ant to see its job. Choose a material to paint. Undo edit restores that moment and pauses.
Keyboard cursor starts in the queen chamber. Arrows move it; Enter paints the selected material; Space pauses.
Autosave keeps only the newest changed scene every 30 seconds and when the page is hidden. Returning loads a valid recovery paused; manual Save scene stays separate. Turn autosave off to stop new recovery writes. Browser storage can be cleared or blocked, and sudden closure can lose recent changes: Export scene for a file backup.
One queen per world, up to 180 workers and 12 beetles. Queen + nest creates 12 workers in an empty colony; placing it again relocates the queen. Fresh habitats and manual loads begin paused and clear edit undo. File imports pause the colony while reading; a successful import offers Undo back to the previous colony. A fresh habitat replaces the current world but does not overwrite your manual saved scene; autosave will update to your changed world. The colony pauses when you leave the tab or window and waits for Resume when you return. No simulation advances while the tab is hidden.
Choose ¼× observation under Speed to watch the same rules advance four times more slowly than 1×. The simulation tick counter follows the world and is restored with saved scenes. One tick pauses and advances exactly once. Changing speed, pausing or returning from a hidden tab discards partial-frame time rather than catching up. These are game ticks, not calibrated seconds or a real settling-speed measurement.
Choose Submerged sand under Fresh habitat and Load habitat. The seventh editable preset opens paused in a tank close-up with 13 sand grains, 391 water cells and no colony. Resume or use One tick: grains sink and spread into a bed along the rock floor rather than staying in a narrow underwater column. Paint rock beside a grain to block that diagonal route, or export the experiment before editing. Fresh habitats leave the manual saved scene separate.
Sand and water exchange grid cells conservatively in this tank; no mass is created or removed by settling. This is a qualitative density/diagonal-settling rule, not a calibrated settling speed, sediment transport, drag, turbulence, grain-size or underwater angle-of-repose model. Soil absorption remains a separate water sink in other worlds. Existing colony objectives, worker behavior, connected-water and soil-moisture rules remain available.
Choose Communicating vessels under Fresh habitat and Load habitat. It opens paused with two rock-walled columns linked by a water-filled bottom channel and no colony. Resume or use One tick to watch the lower right-hand surface rise as the higher left side falls. Paint rock across the bottom passage to interrupt that connection; removing the plug allows balancing again. Use Whole world or Pan to inspect the editable channel. Fresh habitats leave your manual save separate; export a scene file before replacing work you want to keep.
In addition to local gravity and spreading, each orthogonally connected water body can transfer at most one water cell from its highest exposed surface into a lower neighboring air cell every four ticks, when their grid heights differ by more than one. This conserves water-cell count during movement and cannot cross a solid plug or diagonal-only contact. Soil absorption still consumes free-water cells separately. It is a qualitative height-balancing rule, not a numerical fluid-pressure solver: there is no calibrated flow rate, momentum, trapped-air pressure, viscosity, surface tension or siphon model, and surfaces remain grid-stepped rather than perfectly level. OpenStax fluid-pressure background ↗ explains real pressure with depth.
One finger owns each paint or pan gesture; extra touches cannot take over, draw a connecting streak or cancel the first finger. Lift your finger before starting a new gesture. Cancellation, capture loss, leaving the page or losing window focus stops the gesture without rolling back the part already painted. Changing tools, zoom, camera views or scenes, using Undo, or switching to keyboard controls also ends the old gesture. Ctrl/Cmd/Alt shortcuts, composing input and already-handled keys do not paint, move the cursor, pause the colony or interrupt an active stroke. Each paint stroke still uses one Undo edit. This is single-finger editing, not pinch-to-zoom: use the Zoom control and Pan camera tool.
Export scene downloads a portable JSON colony file. Imports up to 1 MB are validated before replacement and leave your manual Save scene separate. The colony pauses while the file is read. If you edit, advance or replace the colony before reading finishes, the pending import is cancelled instead of overwriting newer work. Selecting another file supersedes the earlier read, even if it finishes last. After a successful import, Undo returns to the pre-import colony, paused. Invalid or unreadable files do not replace the world. Keep exported files for backups; local saves and undo are not cloud storage.
Six optional objectives guide a scene: deliver ten food, hatch three workers, excavate 60 soil tiles with diggers, defeat a beetle, hatch twelve workers and deliver 500 food. Claims award 12, 18, 25, 30, 40 and 60 stored food respectively. Delivered food, actual hatches and worker excavation count; instant painted tunnels or workers do not advance those goals. Buy upgrades with the same food needed to sustain the queen. Upgrades, claimed goals and beetle victories are part of scene saves, recovery and edit undo.
Workers start by carrying one food unit per trip; carrier upgrades raise this to two or three. Guards deal one, two or three damage per attack. Nursery upgrades reduce brood development from 110 to 90 or 70 fed, dry ticks and egg-laying from every 90 to 75 or 60 ticks. Every 40 ticks the colony still eats; each new brood costs three food. Watch food and queen health before adding more ants.
Drag the close-up camera, switch between queen and surface views, and inspect individual ant jobs. Paint tunnels instantly, let diggers explore, or choose Order tunnel and mark underground soil for directed excavation. The order finishes when its target connects to the queen; live feedback reports remaining soil or a blocked route. Diggers never cut rock, water or sand, and take one soil-cutting turn every six ticks. Order placement and cancellation support Undo edit, scene saves and keyboard Enter. Rock cannot be dug. Guard ants attack nearby beetles; beetles hunt workers and threaten the queen. Defeated beetles leave 12 recoverable food units. Turn on Wildlife raids for increasingly frequent, larger attacks, or load Wildwood survival. Sand settles and sinks through water, exchanging places with it. When blocked below, a grain can settle diagonally through diagonal water if the side passage is air or water; rock, soil and other solid side barriers still block that route. Each grain moves at most one cell per tick. Water falls and spreads at most one cell per tick in its local movement pass; a separate bounded level-balancing pass can transfer a water cell through a connected body every four ticks; saturated soil cannot discard an extra water cell. Floating food, seeds and unsupported plants fall, keeping their stored food and growth. Seeds resting on soil stay planted. Flooding or burying the queen harms her.
Place seeds on soil, add water beside that soil and leave the sky above open with Daylight on. Moist, lit seeds grow into plants and produce edible leaves. Leaves refill slowly while the supporting soil stays moist. Moisture now spreads gradually between touching soil cells from wetter to drier cells, without crossing rock or open tunnels. Only soil touching open air loses moisture to the evaporation timer. Try Wicking garden bed: one wet cell supplies a seed on a neighboring dry cell. Turn on Soil moisture for a blue wetness overlay and use Inspect for the value. Blue intensity and 0–100 moisture are game units, not measured water content.
This is an original, simplified colony simulation. Ants crawl along floors, walls and ceilings; unsupported ants and beetles accelerate downward everywhere, while the queen needs a floor. Surface routes cannot cross open cavern gaps or solid walls, directed digging uses a shortest grid route rather than biological decision-making, food trails are a fading route signal used only to break equally short foraging ties, and growth, caste assignment, flooding and predation use game rules. It does not reproduce species-specific biology or real timescales. Gravity is measured in grid cells, with capped creature fall speed; water is a discrete-cell model, soil and rock are fixed supports, and creatures do not collide with each other. It is not a continuous fluid, soil-collapse or rigid-body simulator. Soil exchanges at most three moisture units per paired cell every twelve ticks, alternating horizontal and vertical pairs; exchanges conserve units, while plant growth and exposed-surface evaporation consume them. There is no soil-type calibration, water-potential equation or real-world irrigation prediction. USDA NRCS soil-water background ↗ explains actual capillary and gravitational water.