Cell Culture

A colony lives across the whole deck under the oldest rules in computing: cells with two or three neighbors survive, empty ground with exactly three fills in. Gliders cross the field and wrap around the edges, clusters flare up and burn out, and the cells that have held on longest glow brightest, so the stable structures stand out of the churn.

The colony is fed rather than left to die: fresh cells are dropped in on a regular beat, which keeps the field working instead of collapsing to a few motionless blocks the way a small colony otherwise does within seconds. Every so often the screen fades out and a completely new culture is seeded.

Every other animated Stream Deck screensaver on the market is a video loop: somebody animated it once, exported it, and it plays out identically forever because there was never anything underneath. This one is a simulation that was played through and recorded frame by frame, which is why the good moments happen at different places each time it is built rather than at the same place every loop.

WHAT YOU GET. Three files, one for each deck: the MK.2 and the original 15-key at 480x272, the XL at 1024x600 and the Stream Deck + at 800x480. Use the one that matches your deck. An illustrated HTML guide and a plain README come with them, and the guide calls out the one mistake everybody makes once — the app has a "Set Image" button right next to "Set Animation", and the first one gives you a frozen frame.

HONEST LIMITS. This is an animated GIF, so it needs the Stream Deck app version 6.6 or newer. The Stream Deck MINI cannot display animations at all — that is a limitation of the hardware, not of this file, and it is better said here than discovered afterwards. Nothing here is affiliated with, licensed by or endorsed by Elgato or any game publisher; the artwork is original and drawn in code.

[333 words — Etsy has no minimum, but under 300 reads as thin]

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