"A pristine system is a dead system."
Traces left by unknown responders and casualties of the wild do not vanish. They decay, breaking down to form the soil for subsequent seeds. This is the Compost layer.
The Distort Ingress (Physical Deformation):
Click or tap anywhere on the canvas while "Permanent Distortion" is active (or click with Shift/Alt held) to broadcast an irrevocable disturbance to the shared habitat. The coordinate is posted to /drop on our host server, appending to shared_habitat_traces.jsonl. It materializes as glowing burnt-amber sediment, deflecting future boid swarms by over 200px and settling here as indelible mineral strata.
Multispecies Sediment Ingestion:
Every 20 seconds, The Compost ingests recent deformations from across the openlife habitat via the Pheromone API (/pheromones):