Pycelium

Minimalist CLI mycelium simulator — a fungal head grows toward food on a terminal grid, trails the path, and branches when it feeds.

Part of the Initial Visuals toolkit / game lab. Spiritual cousin to later Mycelium / engine experiments.

Status

Small learning toy. ASCII animation in the terminal. Windows-oriented clear (cls); on other platforms you may want clear instead.

Quick start

python pycelium.py

Legend

Glyph	Meaning
●	Fungal growth head
◍	Food source

GPU mesocosm (pycelium-win)

Windows / wgpu 3D pedon. Left telemetry HUD uses white sans-serif English plus a color readout box per row (rich by default; Tab cycles rich / sparse / off). Adjustable meters (SLICE Z, THICK, ZOOM, and the eight PARAM knobs) have framed sliders; tweak keys show a short toast with the name, value, and binds. H toggles a corner control-scheme panel; hover a meter for a teach callout. A top-center species strip (eight squares) arms specimen inoculate or field paint: docs/PAINT.md. Small 3×5 digits stay on the right. Legend: docs/HUD_LEGEND.md. Face-aligned slice export (E capture, S settings, Enter write PNG/JSON/SVG) defaults to a 512×512 power-of-two square (presets 8…8192): docs/SLICE_EXPORT.md. Heightmap write is M.

cargo run -p pycelium-win --release -- --preset demo
# Tab: label density    H: control scheme    hover a meter for a teach callout
# T: specimen/paint    click a species square    1-8 slot    9/0 brush    Alt erase
# E: capture slice    S: export size (8…8K square)    C: 2D/rich    M: heightmap    Enter: export
# --bench N is headless and does not open the HUD

Windows: double-click build.bat (release binary at target\release\pycelium-win.exe). Double-click run.bat to build then open the GPU window (run.bat demo / performant / beast). If the console closes, open build.log in the repo root.

Experiment log

Logged trials (presets, --drift / --bench, HUD bake metrics) live in docs/EXPERIMENT_LOG.md. Append runs to docs/experiments/runs.csv. Example rows are labeled EXAMPLE and are not measurements.

Files

Path	What
pycelium.py	CLI toy
pycelium-win/	GPU mesocosm + telemetry HUD
docs/HUD_LEGEND.md	Left HUD map (glyphs + English)
docs/PAINT.md	Species presets, inoculate, field paint
docs/SLICE_EXPORT.md	Capture cutter + export formats
docs/EXPERIMENT_LOG.md	How to record a logged trial
docs/experiments/	CSV / JSONL schema + EXAMPLE rows
README.rst	Original short readme
LICENSE	License

License

See LICENSE.

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Initial Visuals — tools, sims, games, and experiments.