Briar Systems cellar on GitHubGitHub

Open source · Linux, Windows, macOS

cellar

A fast, unbounded cellular-automata editor and visualizer. Draw a pattern, pick a rule, and watch it run on the GPU, from Conway's Life to Lenia and reaction-diffusion.

Download Source on GitHub
cellar running Gray-Scott stripes, with the pattern library, rule presets and statistics docked around the world

Rule families

One world,
many rules.

Every rule runs on the same unbounded world, and a pattern library of about three hundred classics, Lenia creatures and reaction-diffusion seeds is one click away.

  • A Gosper glider gun firing a diagonal stream of gliders
    Life and its relativesLife-like, Generations, isotropic and Larger-than-Life rules with weighted kernels.
  • Gray-Scott mitosis, a ring of dividing spots
    Reaction-diffusionGray-Scott's model in exact integer steps, identical on CPU and GPU.
  • Hydrogeminium natans, a Lenia creature, drawn on a rainbow colour map
    LeniaBert Chan's continuous automata, with Chakazul's creatures in the library.

What it does

Built for big runs.

cellar is written in Mach on the boom engine, and keeps the work on the GPU wherever it can.

  • Unbounded and GPU-stepped

    A sparse pool of chunks grows in any direction, stepped by compute shaders and drawn straight from the GPU's buffers. Without a capable GPU, every CPU core steps it instead.

  • HashLife

    Gosper's algorithm steps a power of two generations at a time, taking a glider gun to generation 230 in a moment.

  • Golly compatible

    Opens RLE, plaintext, Life 1.05 and 1.06 and Macrocell, runs Golly's .rule tables, and copies RLE ready to paste into LifeWiki or Golly.

  • A real editor

    Draw, erase, stamp, select, walls and drawn boundaries, with undo across every change and panels that dock, tab and float.

  • Bounded topologies

    Any rule runs on a torus, a plane, a Klein bottle or a cross-surface, named the way Golly writes them: B3/S23:T100,100.

  • Headless

    cellar run steps a pattern on the CPU with no window, and --bench measures each engine.

Get cellar

Free and MIT licensed.

Release archives for Linux (x86-64 and arm64), Windows (x86-64) and macOS (Intel and Apple silicon). cellar needs a Vulkan 1.2 GPU, through MoltenVK on macOS.

Latest release Read the guide 
cellar                    # open the editor
cellar pattern.rle        # open a pattern or world
cellar run gun.rle --gens 1000 --out gun.mc
cellar --bench gpu dense  # measure an engine

Press H in the app for the key reference. Space plays, S steps, R randomizes.