Ant Colony 100 Days — queen establishment to mature swarm with 13 chambers excavated
A 3D EPOCH demo: 100 sim-days from Queen Vermilia arriving alone with one starter chamber to a 13-chamber colony with sub-queen, soldier barracks, honey vault, memorial hollow, and 200 instanced workers — Attenborough-cozy and persistent across reseeds.
Built with:
three.js r0.160 (single file)FBM noise procedural sand/dirt + spider-silk tunnel lineslocalStorage colony memory across reseeds
Prompt
Build a single-file HTML page that recreates "100 days in an ant colony" as a continuous 3D autoplay world. From a single queen excavating her first chamber to a thriving 13-chamber colony with a sub-queen ready to disperse. Cozy David Attenborough macro-photography vibe.
Hard constraints:
- One HTML file, < 200KB.
- three.js r0.160.0 from unpkg, IIFE, strict mode, full disposable cleanup, reseed every ~10 min advancing the timeline (NOT resetting memory).
- First body line: <!-- ROUND16_EPOCH v1 -->
- localStorage memory under key `ant_colony_memory_v1` — 12 named ants with role + age + state + seenDays. On reseed advance ages — worker becomes elder, elder dies, new worker named after old ("Wisp II — daughter of original Wisp").
- Generational aging — larva → pupa → worker → elder progresses in real wall-clock time.
- Visible structural change — chambers excavated over time. Day 1 has 1 chamber, Day 100 has 13 chambers connected by tunnels.
- Generation counter HUD: "GEN N OF 3 · COLONY ALIVE".
- 5+ sub-locations: Queen's chamber, nursery, food storage, garbage chamber, soldier barracks, surface foraging plain, dew pond, leaf cutter trail. Final colony has 16+ named locations.
- Mini-map HUD canvas (230×170) showing all chambers + tunnels + active hotspot pulse.
- 100+ named ants total: 12 featured cast (Queen Vermilia, Soldier Tannak, Scout Pip, Forager Wisp, etc) + InstancedMesh worker swarm of 200 + 88-name pool for chyron rotation.
- 15+ director cameras: queen-cam orbit, tunnel POV, surface chopper, foraging trail, pupa close-up, soldier vs predator face-off, dew drop close, food storage wide.
- Cross-system chyron: "Forager Wisp returns with seed 47 — added to Food Storage I."
Tone: David Attenborough cozy. No graphic violence. Predator encounters resolve off-camera with "soldier successfully repels" beat.
Paste this into Claude, Cursor, or Copilot. Change one thing that matters to you.
What I learned shipping it
- How to grow a colony visibly across 100 sim-days by gating chamber excavation + tunnel connections on a 0-100 progress variable
- How to use FBM noise textures for procedural sand/dirt + spider-silk tunnel lines that look macro-photographic but cost nothing in file size
- How to use localStorage to give 12 named ants a 3-generation arc where each elder has a named daughter that takes their role across reseeds