Pick a tool, then drag on the ground. A grub is too heavy for workers — soldiers must cut it up first.
Space pauses.
carries food smell downwind — foragers find a pile from further away if they are standing in its plume
Bars show how much of each signal is on the map right now, scaled against its own busiest moment.
These ants cannot see the food, cannot see each other, and nobody is in charge — not even the queen, who only lays eggs. Each ant wanders, drips scent, and does whatever its age tells it to do.
Everything you are about to watch is built out of that, and nothing else.
Drop some crumbs anywhere. The first ant to stumble on them turns around and lays a food trail home, then taps the ants at the entrance with its antennae — one tap, one new forager. Rich pile, big crowd.
Scent evaporates, so wrong turns fade and the shortest route survives. Nobody chose it.
Press N and the surface disappears entirely. You drop into the nest view and look down at the colony itself: the entrance shaft, tunnels spreading across the whole map, nurseries, larders, and the queen in the chamber furthest from the door.
Only about one ant in ten is ever outside — and only three soldiers, at the hole, facing out, touching antennae with every forager that comes home. Send a raid and watch the rest come up.
Every egg comes out of the tip of the queen's gaster and is carried to a nursery by somebody else. There it becomes a larva, then a pupa, and what comes out is almost white — and cannot move, at all, until it has darkened. Nurses gather round and groom it while it hardens.
The colony never changes size, so every ant that emerges costs one of the same caste: look for the body going the other way, out to the rubbish tip on a nestmate's back.
Built by Mr Lau Chin Hang of CurioMinds, for
