Grain-scale voxel simulation of an ant colony.
Anthill is a research-oriented model in Godot 4.2+ (GDScript), inspired by the biology of Lasius niger (black garden ant): recruitment pheromone trails, cuticular hydrocarbon footprint fields, alarm-like signaling, nest excavation in granular substrate, brood development, and worker behavior—not a player-directed game, but an executable model with a scientific HUD, optional pheromone overlays, and validation export.
Download the latest release (v0.7.18):
Same builds on GitHub Releases — below we mirror the files for direct download from hromp.com.
What’s in the model
Substrate & nest
Chunked heightmap-style world: one voxel ≈ one sand grain in the fiction; loose sand updates with gravity; procedural nest galleries and digging.
Pheromone & footprint fields
Recruitment trail (deposit-on-return, diffusion, evaporation), CHC footprint (traffic-dependent, slow decay), nest-construction cue, and stress-linked alarm field.
Colony life cycle
Queen founding, brood stages, nanitic and worker emergence, trophallaxis-style feeding from stores, task allocation across foraging, digging, and care.
Workers
Scout vs recruit tropotaxis, zigzag and stop sampling, food memory, crowding-aware patch choice, round-trip–scaled trail marking.
Instrumentation
Optional CSV logs and performance tracing for validation runs—see the repo docs under docs/reference/.
Open source
Full source, reference PDFs, technical specification, and changelog live in the repository.
Run it
Prebuilt binaries
Windows: run anthill-0.7.18-windows.exe.
Linux (AppImage): chmod +x anthill-0.7.18-x86_64.AppImage then run the file (portable; embeds the game and engine).
Linux (raw binary): chmod +x anthill-0.7.18-linux.x86_64 then execute — same export as the AppImage without the AppImage wrapper.
Clone & open in Godot
Open the project under game/anthill, or run godot --path game/anthill from the repo root. Install scripts are provided for Linux (scripts/install-anthill.sh)—see the README for PATH and Godot 4 requirements.
Technical
Downloads
Prebuilt exports (embedded PCK; no separate Godot install). Current release binaries are published on GitHub Releases; copies below are mirrored on hromp.com. Older builds stay available if you need them.
v0.7.18
v0.7.12
releases/ tree)
v0.7.11
New desktop builds are published as GitHub Releases; this page mirrors them under /downloads/ for convenience.
Simulation architecture
Godot 4.2+ with GDScript: the world is a voxelized granular substrate with pheromone fields, hydrocarbon footprints, and agent AI for workers. Runs as desktop export (embedded PCK); scientific HUD exposes metrics for validation against literature.
- Time step — fixed simulation tick with optional slowdown for observation.
- Validation — export paths for comparing run statistics (see technical spec on GitHub).
- Rendering — optimized for many agents; optional overlays for chemical fields.