Getting started
The one-minute tour of the app: what to watch, what to try, and where the deeper features live.
The one-minute tour
Open the app and watch — you don't need to do anything yet. Something is always alive somewhere on the grid: a glider drifting, a gun firing, a cluster of oscillators ticking in place.
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Follow a traveller
Two gliders are converging from opposite corners of the default scene. Use the pan tool (P, or drag) to follow one. Give it a minute and they collide — the wreckage blooms into a small chaotic reaction before settling into blinkers and blocks. The field guide is quietly logging it as it happens.
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Scrub backward and change one cell
Drag the history ribbon at the bottom back past the moment of contact, then draw or erase a single cell near one of the travellers. Let it play again. It's a different future — sometimes subtly, sometimes completely: one flipped cell can be the entire difference between a bustling wreck and an empty grid.
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Branch instead of overwriting
Editing the past normally overwrites everything after it. Branch instead, and both futures — the one you had and the one you made — keep playing, comparable side by side. See branching & compare.
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Lift history into the Time Sculpture
Select the stretch of history that mattered and open the Time Sculpture — a 3D stack of every one of those generations, one slice per frame, orbitable and sliceable.
The app also runs a first-run guided tour automatically, with a real spotlight on whatever it's teaching — replay it any time from ? or the compass icon if you skipped it.
Where to go next
- Life fundamentals — if the rules themselves aren't clear yet.
- Keyboard shortcuts — everything is also reachable from ? in-app.
- Features — the full rundown of lenses, branching, the field guide, the achievements logbook, audio, and cinematic mode.