cellar
Engine
A sparse pool of 64 by 64 chunks grows in any direction, stepped by compute shaders and drawn straight from the GPU's buffers. Without a capable GPU, every CPU core steps it instead.
cellar
A fast, unbounded cellular-automata editor. Draw a pattern, pick a rule, and run it on the GPU, from Conway's Life to Lenia and reaction-diffusion.
gen0
pop0
LifeB3/S23
drag to draw
Every rule, one world
Each family runs on the same unbounded world, on the CPU or the GPU, and reads the rule strings Golly and LifeWiki write.
B3/S23
Life and its relatives: Life-like, Generations, isotropic non-totalistic and Larger-than-Life rules, with weighted kernels up to radius 16.
- Life-like
- B36/S23
- Larger than Life
- R5,C0,M1,S34..58,B34..45,NM
- Generations
- B2/S/C3
- Isotropic
- B2-a/S12
- Rule tables
- WireWorld
- Lenia
- R=13,T=10,b=[1],m=0.15,s=0.015
- Reaction-diffusion
- F=0.029,k=0.057
- Bounded grids
- B3/S23:T100,100
Built for big runs
Written in Mach on the boom engine, cellar keeps the work on the GPU wherever it can.
HashLife
Gosper's algorithm steps a power of two generations at a time, taking a glider gun to generation 230 in a moment.
Editor
Draw, erase, stamp and select, with walls, drawn boundaries and undo across every change. Panels dock, tab and float.
Patterns
About three hundred classic Life patterns, Lenia creatures and reaction-diffusion seeds, browsed by category or searched by name.
Files
Opens RLE, plaintext, Life 1.05 and 1.06, Macrocell and Golly's .rule tables, and copies RLE ready to paste into LifeWiki or Golly.
Headless
cellar run steps a pattern with no window, and --bench measures each engine.
Download
Free and MIT licensed. cellar needs a Vulkan 1.2 GPU, through MoltenVK on macOS.
# open the editor, or a pattern, world or .rule file
cellar
cellar gun.rle
# run headless and write the result
cellar run gun.rle --gens 1000 --out gun.mc
# measure an engine
cellar --bench gpu dense- Space
- play / pause
- S
- step
- R
- randomize
- D E T V
- draw, erase, stamp, select
- Ctrl Z
- undo
- H
- every key
The guide covers every rule family, file format and option. To build from source, see the README.