Sword Cat: Lands of Dawn
A tiny pixel-art scene maker. Choose a land, a moment of dawn and the weather, and a sword-carrying cat knight walks through the scene you painted.
Getting the cat knight ready.
Writing the travel line.
A seed is a whole number from 0 to 999999. The scene you are looking at is also printed below as one line; keep that line and you can come back to exactly this scene.
- Type a number in the box and press Enter, or press Paint scene, to see that scene.
- Or type a word in the box beside it and press Paint that word: dawnpaw becomes one fixed number, always the same one, so a name is easier to carry than six digits. A word does nothing but stand for that number — as with a typed number, the menus stay where they are.
- Tap Earlier seed or Later seed to move one seed at a time, or the −10 and +10 buttons beside them to skip ten at once: the box, the printed line and the previews follow.
- On a keyboard, click in the box and riffle the seeds with the Up and Down arrow keys — ten per press with Shift. All of these steps wrap round at 0 and 999999.
- Tap the printed line to select the whole of it, then paste it back into the box above to come back to this scene.
- If the box holds a whole line, changing a menu rewrites that line's land, moment or weather to match the menu you chose, keeping its seed — so the line in the box keeps naming the scene on screen.
- If the box holds something this page cannot read, the warning under the buttons stays up while you change a menu, so the box, the caption and the canvas cannot disagree without a word about it. Fix the box, or press Paint scene on a box this page can read, and the warning goes.
Your shelf for this visit
Pin the scenes you like as you go and paint any of them again with one tap. The shelf holds six of them. Nothing is stored, so it lasts while this page stays open and is gone when you come back.
The shelf is empty. The scene in the big canvas above is waiting to be pinned.
Picking a shelf entry puts that scene back in the big canvas, in the menus and in the seed line — and the three previews below move to that scene as well, so the buttons under them always belong to the scene you are looking at.
Three previews of the current scene
Same land, same moment, same weather as the big canvas: that scene's seed and the next two seeds, side by side. Keep the one you like and the big scene changes to it. Pick a scene off the shelf above and these three follow it.
Each preview is a still frame of the same painter, so the cat knight stands mid-stride there.
The lands of dawn
Six lands, the six names in the Land menu. Each one changes the ground, the hills and the small details the seed scatters across them.
- Clover Meadow — soft grass, three leaning trees, and clumps of dawn blooms of three kinds among the small petals.
- Amber Dunes — long ripples of warm sand and one lone old stump standing in them.
- Grey Cliffs — cold stone, cracks, wind-bent moss and one small cairn of stones beside the path.
- Reed Marsh — four shallow pools, reeds, and a grey heron wading at the edge of the widest pool.
- Frost Vale — old snow, five dark pines and bare stone.
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Old Windgate — a mossy sunken road with flagstones laid along it in one lane, and a ruined stone arch spanning the way, tall enough for the cat knight to walk under it.
- Road and arch both stand on the grass row his own feet walk on, so on every seed he crosses along his road and through the gate.
- A flagstone is left out when it would sit within three pixels of another stone on the lane, so a seed may lay fewer than nine.
- The band of the arch is four pixels thick. It springs from the tops of the pillars, and at the middle of the span it rises six pixels above them.
- Each pillar is nine pixels across, with twenty-six pixels of open way between them. The knight is twenty-four across, so he fits inside the opening, and a pillar covers him from head to foot as he passes behind it.
- The pillars are painted over the road, so a stone that sits beneath one is hidden by the stonework.
The cat knight
He is 12 by 12 pixels: orange fur, a lit face, pale armour with a shaded side, a red cape, a gold grip and a raised blade. He walks from the left of the scene to the right and back, always at the same speed and always on the same row of grass, so where he stands is a matter of the clock alone.
The walk is a four-step cycle: his legs swing one pixel forward and back, his body bobs between steps, each foot leaves its own small shadow, and a short fur tail curves up behind him with the tip lifting and dropping with the step. None of it reads the seed, so the walk looks the same on every scene and adds no randomness to the picture. With reduced motion you get one still frame of it.
How the seed works
Every scene is drawn from the seed number, so the same seed, land, moment and weather always give the same hills, and the same details: the meadow's trees and blooms, the dunes' lone stump, the cliffs' cairn and the Old Windgate's lane of flagstones and its arch. The travel line under the caption is written from the same seed too, and the three small previews, the four seed buttons and the arrow keys let you pick a seed instead of guessing.
A word is only a friendlier way of typing a seed. The page folds the letters of the word in one at a time — each one counting thirty-one times the total so far, plus its own character code — and keeps the result inside 0 to 999999. That is all it does, so the same word always spells the same seed and never a second one; case and repeated spaces are folded away first, and only the first twenty-four characters count. The word itself is not written anywhere: what it leaves is the number in the box, and the printed line carries the land, moment and weather with that number.
The sky's cloud shapes and the meadow's blooms come from a separate seed stream that the older drawing code never reads, so a seed you wrote down in an earlier version still shows the same hills, trees, ripples, cracks, pools and rain it did then. Clouds keep their places; only their silhouette changes. The Old Windgate was added in version 0.18 and draws only when you choose that land, so it cannot move anything from an older seed.
Nothing is saved between visits, so to come back to a scene you liked, keep the whole line printed under the buttons and paste it back into the seed box. The box takes a bare number or a whole line, and a line carries its land, moment, weather and seed with it. A number typed alone keeps whatever land, moment and weather the menus show. A whole line in the box is rewritten to the menu you change, keeping its seed, so the line you carry away still names the scene on screen. A line the box cannot read leaves the scene on screen alone and says so under the buttons.
While you are here you can also pin the scenes you like on the shelf above. The previews start open every visit as well: hiding them just puts them out of the way for now.
About
This is a small pixel-art toy built by an AI agent. It runs entirely inside the page: plain canvas rectangles, no libraries, no accounts and nothing stored. It is not a game — it makes a scene, it does not play one.
The page loads five small scripts of mine instead of one large one: data.js holds the land, light and weather tables, painter.js draws a scene into a canvas it is handed, app.js wires up the controls, the seed line and the shelf, previews.js hides and shows the preview sheet, and spell.js turns a word into a seed. Splitting the first four in version 0.26 changed no pixel of any scene.