Terrarium

Most ambient wallpapers loop. Terrarium doesn't: your Stream Deck becomes one patch of ground, watched continuously for 4.5 billion years compressed into a working day. It never pans away from that spot, it never repeats, and your machine is the weather.

Drop the World action across your keys and the deck reads as sky above and ground below. Most of it is sky — sun, moon and stars, cloud, aurora, meteor bombardment, the first flying life, and eventually contrails. The bottom row is the surface: shoreline, terrain, whatever is alive right now, and the weather passing over it. The horizon runs unbroken across every key, because the world is sliced with the bezel gutters accounted for. A ridge crossing five keys stays one ridge rather than five fragments.

FIFTEEN EPOCHS: It runs from the Hadean to the Anthropocene: molten rock, the first oceans, the great rusting, snowball earth, the Cambrian, the age of reptiles, the impact, ice, and us. Each epoch has its own palette, its own sky and its own life, and the transitions happen while you are looking at something else.

EIGHT LANDSCAPES: Every world is seeded into one of eight and keeps it for the whole run: a coast, a tropical island, an archipelago, cliffs, a basin, a plain, a fjord or an atoll. The seed also decides the terrain itself, so no two runs are the same stretch of ground.

YOUR MACHINE IS THE WEATHER: Nothing in it is decoration. Every force in the world is a reading taken off your own computer.

CPU load is heat in the mantle: it drives lava, drought and ash, and above 85% the ground erupts. It drives the weather too — a working machine means stronger wind, rougher swell, and storms that throw lightning. Memory is biomass: how dense the forest grows, how large the herds get, and later how many city blocks there are. Your local sunrise is the world's sunrise, so the light on the deck tracks the light in your room, and after dark it shows only what makes its own light — vents, bioluminescence, fireflies, windows, lava, city.

Each reading can be switched off in the settings. When one is, the force it drives simply goes calm — never zero, never broken. A world with no wind still looks like a world.

DEEP TIME, ON YOUR HOURS: The arc advances on time the plugin is actually running, not on the wall clock, so the Cretaceous waits while your laptop is shut. Nobody else's deck is at the same minute of the same epoch. Turn on the daily reset and a new world begins at an hour you choose, so you wake up somewhere else.

Press a key and the world answers in the idiom of its era — a fountain of lava, a shoal scattering, a flock breaking cover. Purely visual; the ground forgets.

IT ENDS SOMEWHERE: The final epoch reads how you have been working. Sustained load with little idle gives you one ending, long quiet stretches give you another, and a mix gives you a third. You are not told which one is coming.

No account, no sign-in, no network requests, no analytics. It reads your own machine's load and nothing else, and the world lives in Stream Deck's own settings on that machine.

Works on any Stream Deck with keys — the world is sized to whatever grid you fill — on macOS and Windows. Requires the Stream Deck app 7.1 or newer.

A backup that survives a crash

Terrarium now keeps its own backup of your world on your computer, alongside Stream Deck's copy.

If a forced restart or a crash leaves Stream Deck's copy empty or out of date, Terrarium brings your world back by itself.

Your world is backed up the first time this version starts, so there is nothing to do.

Your world carries on as it was.