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Vibe Lab·SAND

Pour, pile, drift

A pixel hourglass that never empties. A sway-emitter at the top rains a thin stream of color onto the canvas, and grains pile up wherever they land. Drag your finger to pour your own stripes. Each grain follows the same three rules - fall down, then slip left, then slip right - and that's all it takes to build mounds, ridges and shifting layers of sand.

What it does

Cellular automaton on a 128x128 grid. Every frame, every grain checks the cell directly below it: if empty, fall; else try down-left, then down-right; else stay put. Bottom-row cells slowly drain off-screen so the cone reaches a steady state instead of locking.

In the real world

The same family of rules game engines use to simulate fluids and powders (Noita, Powder Toy, Sandspiel). It's also a tiny working model of granular physics - the actual study of how sandpiles, avalanches and cereal boxes behave in the real world.

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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