Drag to pan, pinch to zoom. Use the on-screen buttons for the Guide, terminal, seed, mode and player. Tap ⏸ or ≡ to pause: Resume, Settings, Guide and New seed are there, and Settings holds every control plus all 53 modes.
One cell is one metre — every number on screen stands for a real distance you can feel. You play the game in two moods: the Explorer (a floating map you can zoom and drag anywhere) and the Adventurer — press U and you walk the ground as a little square, walls stop you, and that is where the excitement lives: goals to reach and hunters to avoid.
Press X to place a golden cell roughly 500 steps away. Reach it, score a point, and the next star is about 1.5× farther — a simple “go see what is out there” game that goes on forever. Breadcrumbs keep you from losing the way back: B leaves a trail, F turns every reachable cell blue so you can read a maze like a map, Q clears both.
The world never ends and no two worlds are the same: the computer builds every cell on the spot from a recipe (the mode) plus a seed — the secret number that shuffles the deck. R re-rolls the seed for a brand-new world of the same mode; O walks you through every mode in order.
A mode is the recipe for a kind of landscape — mazes, caves, tile patterns, mountains. Same file, same keys, 53 entirely different places to get lost in; mode × seed = endless worlds.
Related worlds share a bin: hold an F-key (or Shift / Ctrl / Shift+Ctrl) and press a digit 1–9 to jump there on the spot. Digit 0 and digits past a bin's size do nothing; F12+1 is the deliberately slow stress-test lattice (and F12 is also the browser's developer-tools key). The table below is generated from the engine's own shortcut table, so it can never drift.
Press L and night falls around you: a warm lantern lights a pool of ground, walls cast real shadows — and hunters hide in the dark outside your light. Turn Shift+Y on and stray hunters are quietly pulled back to the edge of the pool, circling just beyond what you can see; turn it off and they lurk free. It is the spookiest way to play.
Press J and the world freezes to ice. A fresh press of any direction starts a slide that accelerates forever — there is no top speed — and you plow straight through any hunter in your path. But hunters anticipate you: they race toward the wall where your slide will end, so think twice before committing to a long straight corridor. Press J again to thaw.
On foot you are the prize. Red triangles chase you, and their rules are simple and fair: they move one step for every step you take, so a steady walk never lets them close — but every stop or turn-around hands them ground. They can only see in straight lines, so duck around a corner to lose them; occasionally (~7.5%) one stumbles and misses its step. You have 3 lives; lose them all and you respawn fresh — nothing is ever permanently lost.
The HUD reports real things: your velocity three ways, the goal counter, your lives. The terminal (T) is the power tool — one slash and you can re-seed the world, jump to a mode, save a screenshot, or share the world. Esc steps back through menus and opens the Pause menu; Shift+H brings you back here from anywhere.
=======================================================================
LANDSCAPE EXPLORER - A BEGINNER'S GUIDE
=======================================================================
Hello, and welcome. This little document explains everything about the
game in plain words. No jargon, no programming talk. Just what things
are and how to have fun with them.
=======================================================================
1. WHAT IS THIS?
=======================================================================
Landscape Explorer is an infinite world you can wander through. The
computer builds every part of it on the spot, out of a "recipe" - so
the world never ends and no two worlds are quite the same.
There is no install, no account, no internet needed. The whole game is
one single file called landscape-explorer.html. Just open it in a web
browser (double-click it, or drag it into a browser window) and you are
in. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
A few simple ideas you will meet again and again:
WORLD - the ground and walls you walk on, drawn as a grid of small
squares.
MODE - one of 53 different "kinds of world". Some modes are mazes,
some are caves, some are neat tile patterns, and so on. You
can switch modes at any time.
SEED - the secret number the computer uses to build the world.
Change the seed and you get a brand-new world with the same
mode. It's like shuffling the deck.
CELL - one tiny square of the world. You step from cell to cell.
=======================================================================
2. HOW BIG, AND HOW FAST
=======================================================================
Everything in the world is built on one simple rule: ONE CELL IS ONE
METRE. That is not just flavour text - it means every number the game
shows you stands for a real distance you can feel.
- Walk speed starts at 1 cell per second = 1 metre per second, which
is a calm walking pace (about 3.6 km/h, 2.2 mph). You can dial it
up or down with /speed; it has no upper limit.
- At that pace you cross a football pitch (100 m) in about 100
seconds, and one built-up block of terrain - a "chunk", 32 m wide -
in about 30 seconds.
- The HUD's velocity meter reports the same figure three ways when
help is up: metres per frame (cpf), metres per second (cps) and
kilometres per hour (kcph). Target and measured are both in this
scale.
HOW FAR CAN YOU GO?
The world is drawn on the fly, never stored, so there is no fixed map
edge. The only limit is how big a coordinate the browser can count to.
On Firefox that ceiling is a number with about 315,000 digits; on
Chrome/Edge/Node it towers astronomically higher, a number with about
323 million digits. Either way it is far, far beyond the size of the
observable universe (just ~10^26 metres). Ordinary positions - most of
what you will ever visit - live well below 10^11 cells, which at one
metre per cell is a region wider than the whole Earth-to-Sun orbit
(about 1.3 AU).
ICE MODE, THE PHYSICS LESSON
Press J to freeze the floor. Sliding accelerates you forever - there is
no top speed. At default speed that is a real ~20 m/s^2 of constant
push: about ten minutes on ice reaches roughly 12 km/s (over 43,000
km/h) and eats up ~3,600 km of corridor - enough to cross a continent.
If you had a quarter light-year of straight ice you would get all the
way up to the speed of light (it would take you about 174 days of
constant sliding). Gameplay rarely lets you build that much room, but
the numbers are honest.
=======================================================================
3. STARTING OUT
=======================================================================
When the game opens you are standing in a random landscape, looking at
it from above. If you don't move anything, you will see a few hints on
screen.
The single most useful key is:
Shift+H opens the full help screen (press it again or Escape to
close)
Press that any time you forget what a key does.
=======================================================================
4. TWO WAYS TO PLAY
=======================================================================
You can play the game in two completely different moods:
A) THE EXPLORER (free camera)
The default. The camera is like a floating map - you can zoom in
and out and drag it anywhere. Nothing blocks you. Great for just
looking at the beautiful patterns.
B) THE ADVENTURER (on foot)
Press U and you now walk the world as a little square person.
Walls stop you - you can only walk along open ground. This is
where the excitement lives: goals to reach and hunters to avoid.
Press U any time to switch between the two. Both are equally valid;
the game never forces either on you.
=======================================================================
5. MOVING AROUND
=======================================================================
All the keys you need for getting around:
WASD or ARROW KEYS Move (in adventurer mode: walk. In explorer
mode: slide the camera around)
I and K Zoom in / zoom out
MOUSE WHEEL Zoom, centred on where the cursor is
DRAG (hold mouse) Pan the camera in explorer mode
P and N Move faster / slower (both for walking and
camera)
TAB Teleport. In adventurer mode you blink to a
far-away random spot (good for escaping a
tight corner)
Shift+Tab Teleport back to the very start of the
world
Ctrl+Shift+Spacebar Teleport to the nearest big open space
(useful if you are stuck inside a wall)
Shift+S Set your spawn point to where you are
standing now (you respawn here after
getting caught)
R Shuffle the deck - build a brand-new world
from the same mode, right where you are
Space Advance hunters one step (hold it to keep
them moving). On mobile: the Hunt button.
If you get hopelessly lost, press Tab. There is always a way out.
=======================================================================
6. WORLD TYPES - THE 53 MODES
=======================================================================
A "mode" is the recipe for a kind of landscape. There are 53 of them,
sorted into families. Each family is a "bin": hold an F-key (or Shift /
Ctrl) and press a digit 1 to 9 to switch worlds instantly. Digit 0 and
digits past a family's size do nothing; F12 is reserved (it opens the
browser's developer tools).
FAMILY 1: MAZES (F1 / F2 + digits)
F1+1 maze, F1+2 braid, F1+3 recursive; F2+1 hilbert, F2+2
hilbertinv, F2+3 megamaze, F2+4 megamazep60. Perfect mazes where
every path leads somewhere, twisty tunnels. Think: puzzles.
FAMILY 2: MINES & TILES (F3 / F4 + digits)
F3+1 mine, F3+2 blobs, F3+3 mineshaft; F4+1 tenprint, F4+2 truchet,
F4+3 qr, F4+4 glyphs. Mine networks, then neat repeating patterns:
carpet-like tiles, arrow glyphs, and even giant QR codes.
FAMILY 3: SNOW & PERCOLATION (F5 / F6 + digits)
F5+1 snowyplanes (a vast snowy plain); F6+1 critical, F6+2 critbond
(worlds at the edge of collapse).
FAMILY 4: CAVES (F7 / F8 + digits)
F7+1 cavern, F7+2 plasma, F7+3 dripstonecave; F8+1 cheese, F8+2
spaghetti, F8+3 noodle, F8+4 pillar, F8+5 warp, F8+6 carver,
F8+7 ravine. Soft organic caves: big caverns, cheese pockets,
spaghetti noodles, tall pillar halls, deep canyons.
FAMILY 5: MOUNTAINS, CELLS & FORESTS (F9 / F10 / F11 + digits)
F9+1 mountains; F10+1 voronoi, F10+2 cellular, F10+3 cellnoise,
F10+4 conway, F10+5 crypt, F10+6 conwaygallery, F10+7 babel;
F11+1 weierstrass (a never-smooth fractal). Ridged peaks and
structured cell worlds; F11+6 chip (silicon-wafer interference bands).
ROOMS, WORLDS & TREES (Shift / Ctrl + digits)
Shift+1 chambers, Shift+2 uchambers, Shift+3 colapsedchambers
(rooms with doorways);
Shift+Ctrl+1 underground (blend several cave styles); Ctrl+1 forest, Ctrl+2 forestcave (bigger dramatic worlds);
Ctrl+3 metropolis, Ctrl+4 village, Ctrl+5 subdivisions (settlements,
from a tight city of streets to loose country lanes and estates);
plain 1 = random (walk anywhere).
Other ways to change the world:
O Cycle through all 53 modes, one at a time
(hold Shift+O to go backwards, Ctrl+O jumps
to a random mode)
C Change the color theme (there are eight:
default, dark, ocean, ice, darkice, solardark,
solarlight and inverted).
C+digit jumps to a theme by number.
In ice mode, C switches between ice and darkice.
R New seed = a fresh world of the same mode
A quick tip: there is no wrong way to browse. Flick through the modes
with O and stop when one makes you say "whoa".
=======================================================================
7. GOALS AND CHASING (the star game)
=======================================================================
If you want a little purpose, press:
X Place a goal
A big star is placed far away from you - roughly 500 steps - and a
little "goal" counter appears. Now walk (or fly the camera) to the
star. Reaching it:
- scores you a point (the counter goes up)
- places the next star even farther away
- and so on, forever. Each goal is about 1.5x farther than the last,
until it hits a generous maximum.
It is a simple "go see what's out there" game. In explorer mode you can
just glide there. In adventurer mode you have to actually find the
path - which is where the hunters come in (next section).
=======================================================================
8. THE HUNTERS (the red triangles)
=======================================================================
When you are in adventurer mode, the world is not empty. Red triangles
start to chase you. They are drawn like you and each one points its
nose straight at you.
Their rules are simple and fair:
- They move exactly when you move: one step for every step you take
(a diagonal move counts as two steps). Stop, and they freeze.
- That means a steady walk never lets them get closer - but every
time you stop or turn around, they gain ground.
- They always know roughly where you are, but they can only *see*
you in a straight line. Step around a corner and they lose you.
- Occasionally (about 7.5% of the time) a hunter stumbles and misses
its step, giving you a little breathing room.
How to survive:
- Keep moving. Standing still is how you get caught.
- Break line of sight: duck around a corner or a wall, change
direction, double back.
- Tab-teleport is your panic button.
Getting caught costs a life. You have 3 lives. Lose all 3 and you
respawn fresh with 3 lives again - nothing is ever permanently lost.
If you would rather be alone:
E Turns hunters on and off (off by default).
/enemies 2 (in the terminal) sets how many hunt you,
from 1 up to 8. See section 8.
=======================================================================
9. LANTERN MODE (the flashlight)
=======================================================================
Press L and night falls around you. You hold a flickering warm lantern
that lights a pool of ground around you. Walls cast real shadows into
the darkness.
In lantern mode, hunters are hidden in the dark. You can only see one
when it walks into your light. They may be anywhere just outside the
pool of light, waiting.
Shift+Y Toggles "hunter teleport" (off by default). With it on,
hunters that drift far from your light are quietly pulled
back to the very edge of the pool - so they circle you
just outside what you can see. Turn this off and they
stay exactly where they are, free to lurk in the dark and
creep up on foot.
Lantern mode is the spookiest way to play. Turn the sound up, turn
Shift+Y off, and see how long you last.
=======================================================================
10. ICE MODE (the slide)
=======================================================================
Press J and the world turns to ice. A fresh press of any direction
key starts a slide:
- You accelerate at a fixed rate forever - there is no top speed
cap, so a long straight corridor lets you really wind up.
- You keep going in that one direction until you hit a wall -
mid-slide keypresses are ignored, so commit to your path.
- While sliding you dash straight through any hunter in your path.
But hunters anticipate you: they race toward the wall where your
slide is going to end, so don't blindly commit to long corridors.
- Pressing J again turns it off and restores the normal theme.
If you were in a dark theme (dark or darkice) you stay in the
dark family: J turns the world dark-ice instead of light ice.
In ice mode you can cycle the theme with C: light ice or darkice, a
deep frozen-night variant. The two ice themes are only reachable
while ice mode is on.
Ice mode is fast and a little reckless. The hunters still chase you
at their own pace - they cannot match your slide, but they anticipate
where it will end and head for that wall. Short slides and quick
turns keep them guessing; a long, straight corridor can leave the
pack waiting right where you stop.
/ice (in the terminal) toggles ice mode too.
=======================================================================
11. VISION MODE (the radar)
=======================================================================
Press V and the world goes into "radar" mode: the screen fills with the
current theme's floor color (so the default theme turns it black, the new
inverted theme white) and a ring of single pixels - in the theme's wall
color, one exactly where each ray first strikes - marks precisely where the
walls around you are, one dot for every direction the game can "see" out to
`R` cells. The goal and each hunter absorb rays on exactly the same shapes
they have in normal mode - the goal's small diamond, an enemy's triangle -
stamping the ray's entry point onto that shape in the same wall-colored dots,
so an enemy appears as a speckled silhouette of its normal-mode outline (no
marker drawn on top). Rays that thread past the shape pass through the cell,
so a goal or enemy hides only what lies directly behind it - a true
line-of-sight picture instead of the full bright world of normal
play.
The dots never fade with distance: every one is a solid wall-colored
pixel, so the radar reads as a sharp outline of what is around you.
Rays also stop at the screen edge - anything a ray would hit beyond
the visible screen is not drawn, which keeps long ranges cheap.
- Pressing V turns the radar on (it also puts you into player mode
and spawns you at the center of the screen, like ice and the
lantern do). Press V again to switch back to normal rendering.
- /vision (in the terminal) toggles it too.
- /vision 128 Sets how far the rays reach, in cells (8-256,
default 64). Bigger range = more of the map, but
also more rays and more dots.
- If you hit U (free-fly) while the radar is on, rays come from the
mouse cursor instead of your player - handy for poking around the
map before committing.
- The lantern and the radar are rivals: turning one on switches the
other off (blowing out the lantern also restores the theme it had
forced).
Great for scouting mazes and for checking whether a hunter is actually
in the corridor with you before you commit to a slide.
=======================================================================
12. TRAIL AND FLOOD-FILL (maps and breadcrumbs)
=======================================================================
Three little helpers for not getting lost:
B Trail. Toggle a breadcrumb trail that follows your steps, so you
can see where you came from.
F Flood-fill. Turns every walkable cell you can reach from your
current spot blue - a live map of where you can and cannot go.
Q Clear. Removes the blue map and the trail.
These are especially handy in the mazes, to see whether a corridor is
a dead end before you wander in.
=======================================================================
13. THE TERMINAL
=======================================================================
Press T and a command line opens at the top of the screen. Type
commands with a slash. The most useful ones for everyday playing:
/help Shows the list of all commands
/seed 12345 Build a world from a specific seed (your own
personal world you can return to any time)
/mode maze Jump straight to a specific world type
/speed 2 Walk faster or slower
/enemies off Turn hunters off
/enemies 3 Set how many hunters chase you
/light 12 Lantern radius - how big the light pool is
/ice Ice mode - slides until you hit a wall
/vision Vision mode - the ray-cast radar
/vision 128 Set the radar range in cells (8-256)
/ss Take a screenshot (saves a PNG image)
/share Copy a link to this exact world to the
clipboard (seed, mode, position and settings).
Add -s for a short peer link (~12 chars) that
streams the state live from this tab over the
network (WebRTC/PeerJS) - keep this tab open or
the link dies. Bare /share works fully offline.
/locate portals Find the nearest portal (how far away it is)
/gamerule spawn_portals 0.05
Portal chance per chunk - how often you meet one
(0 = none, 1 = everywhere). Set this any time.
/lock seed mode Lock settings so they cannot be changed by
keyboard or terminal. /lock all locks
everything, /unlock all unlocks everything.
/gm hunt Apply a preset (try /gm ? to see them all).
Presets lock all settings at once.
/vol 0.5 Set the volume (0 = mute, 1 = full)
/rule Shows the tuning dials (enemy count, miss
chance, goal distance, ...). Read-only unless
you know what you are doing.
/export 0 0 200 200 2 Saves a picture of a chunk of the world as a
PNG image file.
/goto 1000 500 Jump the camera to a specific spot
/d ? List the debug tools (hud, charts, watchdog,
stall, dbgdmp, perf, frames, term, clear,
defaults, fatal). /d defaults wipes saved
settings and resets to defaults.
/info Show licence and build info
Press Escape to close the terminal. While typing, Tab completes the
command for you, and the up/down arrows recall what you typed before.
NUMBERS YOU CAN TYPE
Wherever a command wants a number - a seed, a coordinate, a radius -
the terminal reads a few friendly spellings of it:
64 plain digits, as always
2k 2000 (k = thousand; M = million, G = billion,
T = trillion and so on up the SI ladder)
5ki 5120 (ki = 1024; Mi, Gi, Ti... double the previous,
the computer's own ladder)
0x1F 31 (0x = hexadecimal; 0b11 = 3 and 0o17 = 15 too)
7.5e9 7500000000 (e9 = "times a 1 with nine zeros")
2w65536 2 to the power of 65536 (w = power of two)
4t2 400 (t2 = "times 10 squared")
mmax the largest whole number this browser can hold
Two rules worth knowing. A marker letter only starts an exponent when a
digit follows it right away: 5Y3 is 5 times 16 cubed, while a bare 5Y
is the SI prefix yotta. And a decimal point is allowed only when the
answer lands on a whole number of cells: 1.5e3 is 1500, but 1.5e0 is
turned away (that is 1.5, not a cell).
The world gets absurdly large, and huge coordinates are printed in a
short scientific shape like 6.338'25 with a power of ten attached. That
printed form is a legal number too - /goto ? tells you where you are in
exactly it, and typing it back into /goto lands you there again (give
or take a cell at those distances; the display keeps only the first few
digits).
/goto also understands relative moves, so you can nudge instead of
teleporting:
/goto ~4 ~-60 4 cells east and 60 north of where you stand now
/goto ~4~-60 the same move written as a single word
/goto ~10 10 cells east and 10 north
/goto O back to the origin (0, 0)
WHAT ARE THE PORTALS?
Every so often the ground is torn open: a dark vent of swirling shards,
like a rip in the fabric of the world. That is a portal, and it is
one-way. Walk into it and it sends you somewhere far away - no portal
comes back from the other side. Blame the distance: most portals are
1/8 likely to just drop you near where you started, but the rest fling
you out across the world's outer regions, sometimes millions of light
years out (that is what the "void" out there looks like). If you want
more or fewer of them, use /gamerule spawn_portals (0 stops them
completely). To find the nearest one, /locate portals.
=======================================================================
14. A GOOD WAY TO START
=======================================================================
If you are brand new, here is a gentle first route through the game:
1. Open the file and just scroll around a bit. Press C a couple of
times to find a color theme you like.
2. Press F1+1 (a classic maze). Press F to flood-fill, then walk or
pan around to admire how perfect and maze-like it is. Press Q to
clean up.
3. Press F4+4 (glyphs - arrow tiles) or F4+1 (tenprint) for
neat patterns that are a joy to look at.
4. Press F7+1 (cavern) - a friendly open cave. Press X for a goal
and actually walk to it. Watch the star counter climb.
5. When you feel ready, press E to bring in one hunter and keep
walking between goals. Corners are your friends.
6. Save your favourite world with /seed, and come back to it
whenever you like.
=======================================================================
15. WHERE TO LEARN MORE
=======================================================================
This guide covers the essentials. If you want the fine detail:
- README.md The project's main description
- user_guide_modes.txt A friendly tour of all 53 world types
- docs/commands.md Every terminal command and keyboard key
- docs/modes.md All 53 world types and how they are built
- rankings.md Which modes are the scariest in lantern mode
- LIGHTING_MODEL.md The math behind the lantern shadows
- docs/architecture.md What happens behind the scenes
But honestly? You don't need any of them. Open the file, press Shift+H,
and explore.
Happy wandering.=======================================================================
LANDSCAPE EXPLORER - THE WORLD MODES
a friendly guide to all 53 kinds of world
=======================================================================
Hello again. The beginner's guide (user_guide.txt) taught you the ropes.
This one is a tour of the 53 worlds themselves. Each "mode" is a
different recipe the computer follows to build the ground under your
feet. Same file, same keys, 53 entirely different places to
get lost in.
(Terms used in these guides are explained as they come up.)
A reminder of the two things that matter:
MODE - the kind of world. You can switch at any moment, and the
ground around you simply becomes the new world.
SEED - the secret number the mode cooks with. New seed = a fresh
world of the same kind. Press R to re-roll.
So there are really 53 modes x endless seeds = endless worlds. Every
mode below starts from the same honest rule: either a cell is open
ground you can walk on, or it is a wall.
One handy thing to know before we start: in every mode except one, you
must walk along open ground - walls stop you. The single exception is
"random" (plain digit 1), where nothing stops you at all. That is
deliberate, and it will make sense when we get there.
=======================================================================
HOW TO SWITCH WORLDS
=======================================================================
The shortcuts are laid out so that related worlds share a "bin": hold
an F-key (or Shift / Ctrl / Shift+Ctrl) and press a digit 1-9 and you
jump straight there. Digit 0 and digits past a family's size do
nothing; F12+1 is the exp stress test (browsers may grab F12 first).
F1 + 1 to 3 Perfect mazes (maze, braid, recursive)
F2 + 1 to 4 Regular mazes (hilbert, hilbertinv, megamaze,
megamazep60)
F3 + 1 to 3 Mine networks (mine, blobs, mineshaft)
F4 + 1 to 4 Tiles and rooms (tenprint, truchet, qr, glyphs)
F5 + 1 Snow field (snowyplanes)
F6 + 1 to 2 Percolation at pc (critical, critbond)
F7 + 1 to 3 Blob caves (cavern, plasma, dripstonecave)
F8 + 1 to 7 Thin caves (cheese, spaghetti, noodle, pillar,
warp, carver, ravine)
F9 + 1 Mountain terrain (mountains)
F10 + 1 to 8 Cell-based (voronoi, cellular, cellnoise, conway, crypt, conwaygallery, babel, conwaygalleryhistory)
F11 + 1 to 6 Fractal & prime spirals (weierstrass, primespiral,
sachs, primespiraldense, gcd, chip)
F12 + 1 Stress-test (exp)
SHIFT + 1 to 3 Rooms (chambers, uchambers, colapsedchambers)
SHIFT+CTRL + 1 Composite worlds (underground)
CTRL + 1 to 2 Forests (forest, forestcave)
CTRL + 3 to 5 Settlements (metropolis, village, subdivisions)
1 Free world (random)
Forgot which digit does what? Press Shift+H for the full help screen,
or cycle through every world one at a time with O (Shift+O goes
backwards, Ctrl+O jumps to a random one).
Now, the grand tour. Each world gets a short story - what it is, what
it looks like, and why you might enjoy it.
=======================================================================
1. MAZES AND MINE NETWORKS (F1 / F2 / F3 + digits)
=======================================================================
These are the puzzle worlds: twisty passages, deliberate dead ends,
and (in the mines) wide open galleries. Corridors are what you live on.
F1+1 MAZE
The classic. A perfect maze: every single path leads somewhere,
and there is always a way out - you just have to find it. The
corridors are one cell wide and studded with an endless supply of
tiny dead ends. The place every explorer learns to flood-fill (F)
and mark a trail (B). The gold standard.
F1+2 BRAID
Maze's friendlier cousin. Most of the dead ends have been opened
up into loops, so it still looks like a maze but you rarely get
cornered. The corridors are still one cell wide, but now they
double back and meet themselves. Fewer traps, more flowing.
F1+3 RECURSIVE
A maze with mazes inside mazes. Corridors run at four different
scales at once - think big main roads, side streets, alleyways,
and cracks in the wall. Dead ends appear at every size. The
classic "subdivided forever" look, and a joy to zoom into and out
of.
F2+3 MEGAMAZE
A maze walled off into big chunks with thick borders. The borders
are mostly full of doorways - but a door only lets you through if
there is a matching one on the other side, so crossing between
chunks is a rare treat. Feels like exploring a maze that is built
one room at a time.
F2+4 MEGAMAZE P60
The same idea, but with much bigger chunks and roughly half the
doorways (the "p60" is the 60% in the math). Bigger stretches of
maze, rarer connections, more miles between exits. For when
megamaze starts to feel small.
F2+1 HILBERT
This one is a single giant squiggle. The walls are drawn as a
space-filling curve - one unbroken line that folds and folds and
folds itself to fill the whole map. You walk in the thin gaps
between the coils. Neat, hypnotic, and utterly constant: it has
no seed, so R does nothing. The same pattern, forever.
F2+2 HILBERT INV
The opposite squiggle: now YOU walk the curve itself. A single
1-wide path that winds through the whole world without ever
crossing itself. There is exactly one way forward and one way
back, and nothing else exists. The most confining walk in the
game - and quietly the most soothing one.
F3+1 MINE
A proper mine complex. Round room-blobs on a rough grid, joined
by thick, wobbling tunnels - a few long galleries, plenty of
branches, a bit of timber here and there. The most "hand-dug"
feeling world, and a great one for chasing goals through.
F3+2 BLOBS
A string of pearls. Round, smooth hollows linked by narrow
1-2-cell necks, like soap bubbles touching. The tunnels never
swell into fat intersections, so every room feels carved and
separate. Quick to read, satisfying to thread.
F3+3 MINESHAFT
A whole mining network that keeps changing style on you. Huge
districts, each one different: some are dense warrens of tiny
rooms, some are big open halls with wide corridors, some are a
fine grid of micro-chambers, and some are the standard lattice.
Corridors sometimes run through a support post, always leaving a
way around. The most varied single mode - you genuinely do not
know what is over the next border.
=======================================================================
2. TILES AND ROOMS (F4 / Shift + digits)
=======================================================================
Orderly, patterned, man-made worlds. Carpets, signs, rooms, and QR
codes. They are beautiful to look at in explorer mode and interesting
to walk through on foot.
F4+1 TENPRINT
The famous 10 PRINT pattern: a carpet of diagonal slashes, each
8x8 block drawn as "/" or "\" at random. Dense - nearly nine
tenths of it is wall - so walking it feels like threading a
lattice. In lantern mode the endless diagonals read deeply odd.
F4+2 TRUCHET
Tenprint's airy cousin. Each 8x8 tile is one of several pretty
patterns - arcs, diagonals, quarter-circles, checker quads - in
random rotations, and all of it is open floor. Where tenprint
feels like a fence, truchet feels like a dance floor. Great for
simply flying the camera over.
F4+3 QR
Yes, those QR codes. The whole world is paved with giant QR codes,
edge to edge with white gutters between them. Dark squares are
walls, light squares are ground, so each code is a mini-maze you
could (in theory) scan. The bullseye corners are unmistakable.
A world that makes your phone nervous.
F4+4 GLYPHS
Arrow signs on a one-wide grid. Every cell edge points toward one
of its four neighbours, so the paths carry a strong sense of
direction - follow the arrows and the ground seems to want to
lead you somewhere. Like a network of one-way signs, drawn as a
world.
SHIFT+1 CHAMBERS
Rooms. Big square rooms - 32x32 - with thick walls between them,
each wall holding a door slot that opens about four times out of
ten. But here is the twist: a wall only lets you through where
two neighbouring rooms both happen to have a door in it. So the
rooms are real rooms, and some walls are simply sealed.
SHIFT+2 MICRO-CHAMBERS
The same room-and-door idea, shrunk down hard. Tiny 7x7 rooms,
tiny single-cell doorways, walls everywhere else. Most of the
world is solid rock with little hollows punched in it, joined by
single-cell cracks. Intimate, dense, and surprisingly atmospheric
- like a maze made of matchboxes.
SHIFT+3 COLAPSEDCHAMBERS
Micro-chambers with collapse zones. Most of the world is the
same 7x7 room grid as uchambers, with tiny single-cell doorways
connecting tiny rooms - but a slow fractal noise field
occasionally peaks high enough to replace whole sections with
solid rock. The solid blocks interrupt the regular room grid,
forcing you to detour around them or find a rare crack through.
Most of the time it reads like uchambers: intimate, dense,
doorways everywhere. Then suddenly the rooms stop and a wall of
stone fills the view. Like a matchbox maze with occasional
collapsed ceilings.
=======================================================================
3. PEAKS, FRACTALS & PERCOLATION (F5 / F6 / F9 / F11 + digits)
=======================================================================
A little row of strange worlds that do not fit the caves or the tiles.
Math made walkable.
F9+1 MOUNTAINS
Two worlds in one, split by a sharp treeline. Above the line, the
peaks form a sparse, broken labyrinth of ridges - about one cell
in five is open. Below it, a proper forest of trees and winding
paths. Walk up, and the land turns to puzzle; walk down, and it
turns to woods.
F11+1 WEIERSTRASS
A genuine mathematical monster: the Weierstrass function, the
famous curve that is too jagged to ever have a smooth point.
Drawn as a world, it makes bands and ridges at many scales at
once - big bands of 128 cells, then 42, then 14, then smaller
still, all piled on top of each other. Rough, spiky, endlessly
interesting to zoom through.
F11+2 PRIMESPIRAL
The Ulam spiral made physical. Numbers spiral outward from the
center, and wherever a number is prime, a wall appears. The result
is thin walls that follow the famous diagonal lines where primes
cluster, with wide passages between them. The spiral structure
gives you just enough orientation to stay oriented.
F11+3 SACHS
A radial cousin of primespiral. Numbers spiral outward on
concentric rings, and walls appear where a number is prime or
where both its neighbors are prime. The result is ring corridors
at prime-numbered radii, connected by radial arms - a geometric
pattern of circles and spokes, more open and regular than
primespiral.
F11+4 PRIMESPIRALDENSE
Like primespiral, but denser. Walls appear where a number is
prime or where either neighbor is prime, creating thick connected
corridors along the diagonal polynomial lines. About 30% of cells
near the center are walls, so the spiral pattern is unmistakable
even at a glance.
F11+5 GCD
The number-theory lattice. A cell is open exactly when its two
coordinates are coprime - the greatest common divisor is 1. The
result is a fine, even lattice of open ground about 61% dense,
where walls appear only as small blotches where both coordinates
share a factor. The lines x=-1, x=1, y=-1 and y=1 are fully open,
so long sightlines run straight across the world and nothing can
ever trap you. The pattern does not depend on the seed at all.
F11+6 CHIP
Silicon-wafer interference fringes. A cell is open (lit wafer band)
exactly when the mod-2 parity of
floor(floor(y) * (floor(x)*PI + e)) is even. Near the origin the
slanted diagonal bands are wide and walkable, but the irrational
product grows without bound, so the even/odd seams shear into
fine 1-cell meanders as you travel outward - a faint endless
lattice in the dark. Like gcd, it never depends on the seed.
F6+2 CRITBOND
A world balanced on a knife's edge. Every cell joins its
neighbours through open or closed bonds at exactly the moment the
network is about to fall apart - the percolation tipping point.
The result: fragile patches of open ground that only just barely
hold together, like cracks in a frozen pond. A scattered,
half-formed maze that changes character with every seed.
F5+1 SNOWYPLANES
A snowy plain, freshly fallen. Almost the whole world is open,
flat, white ground - but here and there, where the snowfall ran
deepest, a rare drift rises out of the snow: a single mound of
wall you have to walk around. It is the emptiest world in the
game, a place for calm, long strolls across an endless field of
white.
=======================================================================
4. CAVES (F7 / F8 + digits)
=======================================================================
Soft, organic, natural-looking caves. These are the classic "worm a
tunnel through stone" worlds, and the best place to start if you just
want a pretty walk.
F7+1 CAVERN
The friendly cave. Big open blobs with smooth, curving walls,
carved by simple gentle noise. Nothing sharp, nothing cramped -
just honest cave, the kind a child draws. The recommended first
world. Press X, put down a goal, and take a long walk.
F7+2 PLASMA
Cavern's softer sibling: the same cave blobs, but rounder and
calmer, with the hollows nudged toward the middle of each area.
Fewer sharp nooks, more comfortable open space. A good warm-up
world.
F8+1 CHEESE
Swiss cheese as a cave. Lots of small, round pocket-rooms, joined
by narrow mouths, with plenty of solid rock between them. It is a
labyrinth of little chambers - like a honeycomb eaten halfway.
Every room is a hiding place, which makes it a sneaky one in
lantern mode.
F8+2 SPAGHETTI
A plate of it. Two separate fields of twisty noodles wound into
each other, so the open ground is a tangled net of 1-2-wide
corridors threading through thick wall. Turns constantly, crosses
itself, never goes straight for long. Fast and confusing to walk
- exactly the point.
F8+3 NOODLE
Just one noodle. A single thin band of open ground, one or two
cells wide, snaking through endless solid rock. There is no
branching, no choice, no escape - just follow the noodle. It is
beautiful, and it is officially the scariest world in the game
when the lantern goes out. Walk it if you dare.
F8+4 PILLAR
Cheese cave, but somebody dropped in the columns. Wherever the
cave would have left a pocket of open space, a second, slower
pattern sometimes grows a thick round pillar right in the middle
of it. Result: rooms with hidden blind corners everywhere you
turn. A cave that plays tricks on you.
F8+6 CARVER
A wandering line carved into stone. The open path is a thin
contour that follows the terrain, constantly changing width,
doubling back on itself, and meandering like a river that forgot
where the sea is. Following it feels like tracing a coastline.
F8+7 RAVINE
Canyons. The ground is carved into long, parallel gorges by
noise that is stretched sideways until it is all ridge. Standing
in one you can see a very, very long way along it, and only a
wall of rock at each end. Great sightlines, a strong sense of
direction, and a striking world to fly over.
F8+5 WARP
Caves that fold. Before the stone is carved, the whole map is
twisted and curled by a slow invisible field, so the caves bend
and wrap back on themselves like taffy. Every passage is
constantly turning, and you can never see far ahead. The
opposite of ravine: no sightlines at all, just surprise after
surprise.
F7+3 DRIPSTONE CAVE
Cave with decorations. The walls are studded with clusters of
dripstone - stalagmites and stalactites - poking through the
surface wherever the stone grew deep. Imagine a normal cave, then
imagine it dripping. One of the prettiest caves to wander slowly
through.
=======================================================================
5. CELLS, FORESTS, SETTLEMENTS & COMPOSITE WORLDS (F6 / F10 / Ctrl / Shift+Ctrl + digits)
=======================================================================
The big, dramatic worlds. Built from several patterns at once, they
reward a slow look and a long walk.
F10+1 VORONOI
Geometry as a cave. The world is a diagram of polygonal cells -
like a honeycomb made of irregular stones - where every polygon
has a rock pillar at its centre ringed by open floor, and the
walls run along the straight edges between cells. Hard corners,
blind pillars, and a map that looks engineered. Gorgeous from
above, tricky on foot.
F10+2 CELLULAR
The cave with smoothed edges. The map is drawn coarsely and then
sanded: every nook and jagged tooth is filed away until only
wide, rounded caves with soft walls remain. The most comfortable,
most open-feeling cave in the family - a lovely place to put down
a goal and just cruise.
F10+3 CELLNOISE
Caves drawn with a fat crayon. Huge, coarse regions of open floor
alternate with equally huge masses of wall, in broad blobby
steps - like a map drawn on a very low-resolution screen and then
enlarged. Simple, chunky, and strangely satisfying to stroll
through.
F10+4 CONWAY
A living world turned to stone. Start with pure random noise, let
Conway's Game of Life churn it for two hundred generations, then
flip it over: everything that died becomes open floor, everything
that survived becomes a wall. By gen 200 the soup has mostly
collapsed, so the world reads ~93% open - a wide plain scattered
with the sparse ash of the dead field: little still-lifes,
blinkers, and soft clumps of debris that block your sightlines on
every side. Almost empty, yet strangely cellular; every direction
looks like the one you just left. (Fresh areas cost a ~2s
one-time draw as you walk in.)
F10+5 CRYPT
A library of every possible world-block, in cipher order. The
map is a spiral of 16x16 square tiles, and the tile at step n is
the world-seed encryption of n - a cipher that is a clean
one-to-one shuffle, so walk the spiral outward and you pass each
of the 2^256 possible 16x16 grids exactly once, in the order
your seed picks. Open three-cell aisles ring every block, so from
above it reads like a library floor of tiny rooms you can walk
between. Block zero at the origin is an open plaza where you land;
beyond it every tile is roughly half open. (Each block is drawn
on first sight - a quick one-time draw per fresh area.)
F10+6 CONWAYGALLERY
The cipher library, but left running. Each 16x16 block keeps the
cipher-order layout of CRYPT, but its pattern is a Game-of-Life
world evolved on a loop - every block is a torus that wraps onto
itself, so each one lives out its own life in isolation for a
fixed number of generations before the survivors are turned to
stone. The soup of a cipher block collapses into flickering
still-lifes, blinkers, gliders and ash, all ringed by the same
three-cell aisles you can walk. Those aisles are dotted: a line
of wall-dots runs down the middle of every gutter. The origin
stays an open plaza. Set the generation count with /rule
conway_gol_iters (0 prints the raw cipher block again).
F10+7 BABEL
Every row of the world is one book, and every step you take to
the right reads on through it. Letters are stamped into the
floor in a small 8x8 pixel font, one world-cell per pixel, so a
line of text is 8 cells tall and you can stride along entire
books. Each book is the seed encryption of its own row number -
all ninety-five printable characters, in cipher order - so the
library is infinite and every row you cross spells a different
passage. Two aisles run between the lines of text: an eight-cell
band under the letters, and a one-cell gap between every
character, so you can always walk the page. Nothing in it is
meant to be read; it is a text you wander through.
F10+8 CONWAYGALLERYHISTORY
The cipher library left running, with time laid out flat. Each
block still is a Game-of-Life world on a loop, but instead of
showing only where it ends up, the map unrolls its whole life to
the right: one 16x16 frame per generation, so a single world
spreads across a strip of tiles - generation 0 (the raw cipher,
turned inside out), then 1, then 2, all the way to the last one.
Walk right and you watch a world evolve generation by generation,
then step into the next world's strip and watch that one. Stand
still and look up or down and you are seeing the same moment in
time of the worlds stacked above and below. Same dotted aisles
ring every frame. Set the length with /rule conway_gol_iters; the
strip is that many generations plus the starting frame. The origin
is an open plaza.
CTRL+1 FOREST
A real forest. Tall trees grow in clumps on a rough lattice, with
about seven in ten open, and winding paths carved between them.
It feels alive: dappled, irregular, full of little clearings.
If you have ever wanted to walk through a procedural wood, this
is the mode.
CTRL+2 FORESTCAVE
A cave that grew a forest. The normal cave stone is there, but
patches of trees carve galleries right into the walls, opening
the rock up into great mossy chambers. Stone and wood mixed, with
all the quiet atmosphere of both. A wonderful middle ground
between the caves and the forest.
CTRL+3 METROPOLIS
A city, but never on a grid. The ground is divided into irregular
blocks by a diagram of winding cell-edges, and those edges become
the streets. Each block is a solid building you walk around, with
a thin sidewalk ring, most blocks carrying a small open courtyard
in the middle, and roughly one block in ten thrown open as a
public square. Nothing repeats: the streets curve, the blocks
differ in size and angle, and every seed lays out a different
town plan.
CTRL+4 VILLAGE
Open countryside. Big, wide fields lie between thin hedgerows
that follow the same kind of winding cell-edges as metropolis,
but here the hedges are broken - only about half of each hedge
is solid, so you slip through the gaps like an open gate. Small
cottages sit near the centre of about half the fields. Airy and
hand-drawn, the calmest of the three settlements.
CTRL+5 SUBDIVISIONS
An administrative warren. The whole map is divided again and
again into quarters - but each division is chosen by the seed,
so regions come in every size from huge halls down to little
offices, and the walls almost never line up across the whole map.
Open rooms behind one-cell walls, with doorways punched near the
middle of each edge. Endless bureaucracy, and somehow never the
same twice.
F6+1 CRITICAL
A world right at the edge of collapse. Every cell is open or
closed by pure chance at exactly the magic probability where
clusters of open ground are just barely big enough to span the
map - the critical point. The result is fractal chaos: giant
jagged blobs of floor separated by hair-thin necks and tiny
islands, everywhere. Raw, wild, and always on the verge of
falling apart. A chaos you can walk.
1 RANDOM
The one wild card. Every single cell is a coin flip - open or
wall, completely at random, with no structure anywhere. This is
also the only free mode: walls do not stop you, so you can glide
through the clutter like a ghost. It exists to show you what
"no recipe at all" looks like. After a few seconds of this,
every other world will feel like architecture.
SHIFT+CTRL+1 UNDERGROUND
A whole continent in one mode. The world is divided into organic,
folded regions, each with its own terrain: great open halls, a
forested cave, sealed micro-chambers, dripstone caverns, and
networks of thin connecting tunnels. Wander far enough and the
ground simply changes character around you. The richest world to
explore on foot - every boundary is a new adventure.
SHIFT+CTRL+2 BIOMES
Four climates, one world. A slow continental field decides which
of four styles you are standing in - wide cavern blobs, cheesy
pocket rooms, dripstone rims, or forest glades - and the borders
between them stay soft and porous so you can always wander
through. The natural partner to underground: where that one
switches in folds, this one blends in broad, gentle regions.
F12+1 EXP
The lab behind the lab. This world is not built to be walked - it
is a stress test: each cell runs a deliberately slow piece of
modular maths, so the terrain takes its sweet time appearing and
the chunk workers sweat. A dense ~3/4-open lattice, uneventful to
cross when it does render. Open it to feel how fast the engine can
fill a screen; then press O to go somewhere friendlier. (Browsers
often grab F12 for their own devtools, so /mode exp or the O key
is the reliable way in.)
=======================================================================
A LITTLE CHEAT SHEET
=======================================================================
World Key In one phrase
------------------ ---------- ---------------------------------
maze F1+1 the perfect maze
braid F1+2 maze with loops
recursive F1+3 mazes inside mazes
megamaze F2+3 walled-off maze chunks
megamazep60 F2+4 megamaze, bigger, fewer doors
hilbert F2+1 walk between the coils
hilbertinv F2+2 walk the squiggle itself
mine F3+1 proper mine complex
blobs F3+2 a string of pearls
mineshaft F3+3 districts of mining styles
tenprint F4+1 the famous diagonal carpet
truchet F4+2 pretty rotating tiles
qr F4+3 a planet of QR codes
glyphs F4+4 arrow signs everywhere
chambers Shift+1 big rooms, sealed doors
micro-chambers Shift+2 tiny rooms, tiny doorways
colapsedchambers Shift+3 micro-chambers with collapse zones
mountains F9+1 peaks above a treeline
weierstrass F11+1 the never-smooth fractal
primespiral F11+2 Ulam spiral prime walls
sachs F11+3 radial prime rings
primespiraldense F11+4 dense prime corridors
gcd F11+5 the number-theory lattice
critbond F6+2 cracks on the verge of breaking
snowyplanes F5+1 vast plain with rare snow drifts
cavern F7+1 the friendly cave
plasma F7+2 softer, rounder cavern
cheese F8+1 swiss-cheese pockets
spaghetti F8+2 tangled thin noodles
noodle F8+3 one endless thin noodle
pillar F8+4 cheese with columns
carver F8+6 a wandering carved line
ravine F8+7 long parallel canyons
warp F8+5 caves that fold and curl
dripstonecave F7+3 caves with stalactites
voronoi F10+1 stone honeycomb geometry
cellular F10+2 soft, sanded caves
cellnoise F10+3 fat crayon regions
conway F10+4 game of life, flipped to stone
crypt F10+5 every 16x16 block, in cipher order
conwaygallery F10+6 cipher blocks left running as life
babel F10+7 each row a book, printed in pixels
conwaygalleryhistory F10+8 gallery life unrolled left to right
forest Ctrl+1 a real forest
forestcave Ctrl+2 cave with tree galleries
metropolis Ctrl+3 an organic city of winding streets
village Ctrl+4 open fields and broken hedgerows
subdivisions Ctrl+5 an administrative room warren
critical F6+1 fractal chaos at the tipping point
random 1 pure coin-flip noise (free mode)
underground Shift+Ctrl+1 a continent of folding regions
chip F11+6 silicon-wafer interference bands
exp F12+1 the slow stress-test lattice
=======================================================================
WHERE TO GO NEXT
=======================================================================
Still not sure where to begin? Three gentle first stops:
- Press F1+1 (maze), press F to flood-fill, and watch how the blue map
shows you every reachable path. Press Q to tidy up.
- Press F7+1 (cavern) for the friendliest cave, then Ctrl+1
(forest) to see the same engine grow trees.
- Press O and just flick through everything - the game will show you
a random corner of each world. Stop when one makes you say "whoa".
If you want the how-it-works side of things, the full technical
descriptions of every mode live in docs/modes.md. But honestly, the
worlds explain themselves. Happy wandering.