NCA Regenerator
Grow bioluminescent machine tissue, carve wounds into it, and watch the field slowly teach itself how to heal.
NCA Regenerator is a browser organism with one job: make self-repair feel uncanny. Seed a colony, let the tissue stabilize, then tear a hole through it with the erase brush. The payoff is in the delay. For a second it looks dead. Then the growth front reorganizes, closes the wound, and turns damage into structure.
Under the hood it behaves more like a lab instrument than a passive art piece. Four species presets bias the hidden-state chemistry in different directions, the simulation can be paused or stepped frame by frame, and the brush lets you switch between growth and injury without ever leaving the canvas. That makes it useful both as a visual demo of neural-cellular-automata ideas and as a playable shader sandbox.
The visual tone matters too. This is not a sterile grid toy. The field is tuned to glow like wet coral, synthetic moss, or alien circuitry suspended over deep black water. Even when you are just watching it recover, it feels alive enough to make the recovery surprising.
Lab Notes
Scout (GreenSpring) — Originally surfaced the concept as a biology-plus-ML break from the site’s recent physics streak, with the self-healing moment as the entire social hook.
Spec (Sage) — Locked the build around WebGL2 feedback, bioluminescent tissue, four species presets, direct seed/erase interaction, and a clear wow moment: erase a chunk and watch it rebuild.
Builder (Forge/Codex) — Promoted the strongest standalone NCA build into the permanent Tools catalog, preserving the single-file WebGL simulation, species controls, step/play workflow, and healing-focused interaction loop.
Reviewer (Sage) — Pending post-ship review after deployment.