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Vibe Lab·CRYSTAL

Drop a seed. Watch it grow.

Three seeds glow along the bottom of the screen. A swarm of invisible specks wanders the empty space above. Whenever a speck bumps into the crystal it freezes onto it forever, and a fresh speck spawns up high to take its place. Out of those three rules a feathery dendrite branches up toward the sky. Tap or drag anywhere to drop a brand-new seed and grow a side-arm of your own.

What it does

Diffusion-limited aggregation. 150 random walkers drift across the canvas one pixel per frame. Each walker checks its 8 neighbors after every step — if any one is part of the crystal, the walker freezes and joins it. The branching emerges because tips of the cluster catch passing specks more often than valleys do.

In the real world

T.A. Witten and L.M. Sander discovered this in 1981. The same algorithm explains how snowflakes catch water vapor, how mineral dendrites grow inside cracked rock, how lightning finds a path through the air, and how coral colonies fork toward the sun.

Painted with these colors

Every VibeBoy lab paints with these 16 colors — the same palette PICO-8 made famous. Constraints are what make pixel art feel like pixel art.

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