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Manic Microbes

Download

Unpack it and run it.

One archive per platform, assembled from the tag by the release workflow rather than by me on a laptop. Inside each: the microscope, the headless runner, the scenario library, the genomes and both licence texts. There is no installer, no launcher and no account.

v0.4.0

current release

16 August 2026

published

13

instruction set

What is built, what is next, and the questions people ask

This one wants a desktop

The microscope wants a keyboard, a window big enough to put a slide in, and a GPU from the last decade, so the builds are for Windows, macOS and Linux. Open this page on one of them and the archives are in this space.

One release cannot read another's slides

Every save file, scenario and archived genome carries the instruction set version it was written under — 13 here. A file carrying a different number is refused rather than misread, because under another instruction set the same bytes are a different program. Which is why every release stays up rather than being tidied away: a slide from an older one opens in the release that wrote it.
Every release, with its notes and its checksums

Or build it from source

The repository carries everything the archives do and the tests besides, so this is the route to take if you want to change something — or if you are on a machine none of the builds above covers.

$git clone https://github.com/dbennell/ManicMicrobes.git && cd ManicMicrobes
$cargo run -p mm-app --features render --release

That is the microscope. To run a world headless instead — no renderer, a thousand times realtime, metrics out as JSON:

$cargo run -p mm-cli --release -- run scenarios/soup.ron --genome genomes/ancestor.mm --ticks 50000 --check

The --genome is not optional. A scenario is a recipe rather than a state: it seeds the light and the chemistry but puts no cells on the slide, so without one you get sterile water and a population of zero. With the ancestor in it, that command reaches first self-replication around tick 500 and has two species by fifty thousand.

What you need

  • Rust stable, 1.95 or later — rustup is the easy way to get it
  • A GPU with Vulkan, Metal or DX12 support, for the microscope
  • No system packages: Bevy comes in with its default features off, so there is no audio or input library to install first
  • On a Wayland desktop, XWayland — the front-end builds against X11, and almost every distribution ships it
  • 4 GB of RAM for a small slide, 8 GB for a large one, and as many cores as you have: the fluid solver and the cell tick are both parallel

The first build is the slow one — almost all of it is Bevy, and it leaves around 2 GB in target/. Everything after that is quick.

The repository, and a README that goes further

Free, and the licence is in force

It is free and it stays free: no paid tier, nothing behind a wall, no advertising, no telemetry, no accounts. The source is under MIT or Apache-2.0, dual, at your option — so you can take whichever suits you, and both texts are in the repository rather than merely claimed in the metadata. The name and the logo stay mine, which is the one thing a licence cannot do for you.