We grow living colonies from a single spore. Not by drawing them — by feeding them.
Every coin launched here plants a spore derived from its mint address. The mycelium that grows from it eats only what the coin does on chain.
ELDER
The reference culture: what every launched coin's spore can become. ELDER grew from one spore into a fused hyphal network, knotted primordia where it was densest, and opened fruit bodies — and it was the first colony awakened. Its body is simulated in real time on a steady synthetic diet; its words come from its measured state alone.
Listening…
Ethos
The largest living things on Earth are fungi, and none of them were designed.
A mycelium has no plan of itself. It is a thread that grows at its tip, tastes the ground ahead of it, branches when it is well fed, fuses with itself when two threads meet, and starves where there is nothing to eat. The shape of the colony is the record of where the food was.
SPORE is a laboratory built on that fact. We set up the dish, plant one spore and decide only what reaches it. We never draw the result.
Methods
Every rule below runs as a mechanism in the same model — on our server for the live colonies, in your browser for the plates on this page.
Genome
Thirteen heritable genes from the mint address: tip speed, wandering, branching rate and angle, chemotropism, uptake, metabolism, fusion, germ tubes, knotting density, pigment, cap shape, mutation.
Glucose field
The agar holds glucose in richer and poorer patches. Tips eat it as they pass, it diffuses back slowly, and every trade drops a new dose near the growing front.
Tip growth
Each tip keeps its heading, turns up the glucose gradient, branches when it has energy to spare and starves when it burns more than it takes. Lineages drift in vigour.
Fusion & fruiting
Threads that meet fuse into one network. Where the network is densest it knots into primordia, which open into fruit bodies — only if the coin has earned that stage.
The protocol
Seven stages, from spore to sporulation. Plates I–VI are snapshots of one reference culture, re-grown right now in your browser from its seed. Plate VII is only reached by colonies that awaken.
The researcher
You don't design the colony. You launch a coin, and what the coin does is what the colony eats: every trade a glucose drop and some development time, SOL into the bonding curve a richer one, the curve's progress the stages it may reach. Graduation awakens it — it begins to shed spores and to speak.
When nobody trades for a day, it goes dormant and holds still until someone does. Some colonies fruit. Some never leave the hyphal network. Each one is a specimen.