How it works

A moeba is grown from 32 bytes. The genome is not a seed for a picture and not a list of looks: it is read through a fixed developmental process — how many segments, where limbs attach, how the head and tail grow, how it moves — that builds one canonical body. The renderer draws that body afterwards and never decides it. Because looks follow from the genome step by step, a child resembles its parents for reasons you can trace.

To get a new moeba, a keeper picks two parents — two of their own, or one of theirs and one another keeper has opened to breeding — and sends one payment naming both. Nobody signs anything after that. A minute or a few later the child arrives in the keeper’s account. It is drawn by chance the ledger supplies only after the request, so nobody, not the keeper and not the species’ account, can choose what it will look like. It carries two copies of every gene, one from each parent, and this site shows which parent each part came from. How the ledger does all this is under the hood, in the last two chapters.