cbonsai

What it is

cbonsai grows a bonsai tree as ASCII art in the terminal. Branches split and extend according to growth parameters, producing a different believable tree each run — or the same tree every run, if you pin the seed. It has a static print mode (--print), a --live animated growth mode, an --infinite loop, and a --screensaver mode (live + infinite combined) that makes it a genuine terminal screensaver. Trees are drawn with colored characters chosen by branch type and direction.

The options that matter for KN-86:

Flag	Effect
--seed=INT	Reproducible generation — same seed always grows the same tree. The hook for everything below.
--live	Animate growth step-by-step rather than printing the finished tree.
--infinite	Grow trees continuously, one after another.
--screensaver	--live + --infinite — the screensaver mode.
--life=INT	Total growth extent (0–200, default 32) — how far the tree develops.
--multiplier=INT	Branching density (0–20, default 5).
--wait=TIME / --time=TIME	Pacing between trees / between growth steps.
--base=INT	Plant-base / pot style.
--leaf=LIST	Leaf characters.
--message=STR	Text drawn alongside the tree.

The whole thing is a tight, self-contained example of seeded procedural generation rendered as live terminal animation — which is precisely the shape of two things KN-86 already has (LFSR procgen, the seed-capture mechanic) and one thing it wants (a canonical ambient/screensaver mode).

KN-86 relevance

1. A strong ambient / screensaver reference

KN-86 wants an idle/attract aesthetic — something the deck shows when it’s powered but unattended, and something the attract pipeline can use. cbonsai is the right kind of reference: a single generative scene that grows, holds, and regenerates, indefinitely, with no operator input. It slots alongside the existing screensaver-lineage references in the corpus — the R4 neo / astroterm screensaver work (matrix-rain / star-field ambient generators) and ascii-effects.md’s reveal/animation grammar. Where neo/astroterm give motion-noise ambient (rain, stars), cbonsai gives structured-growth ambient (a thing that builds itself and resolves). KN-86 wants both registers in its ambient palette; cbonsai is the structured-growth exemplar.

2. The decisive hook: seed-determinism maps onto KN-86’s existing substrate

This is why cbonsai is more than a mood-board entry. KN-86’s procgen is LFSR-based, and the deck already persists a seed with documented determinism semantics: deck-state.md stores cipher_seed[4] (“two decks with identical state produce identical Cipher text”). cbonsai’s --seed is the same idea in a different domain — same seed, same tree. The two compose directly:

An operator-captured seed grows a deterministic ambient scene.

The KN-86 seed-capture gameplay mechanic already lets a operator capture a seed (CIPHER-LINE seed-capture mode, TERM key context per ADR-0016). Feed that captured seed to a cbonsai-style generator and the operator gets a specific, reproducible, shareable ambient scene that belongs to that seed. Two decks fed the same captured seed grow the identical bonsai — the same property deck-state.md already guarantees for CIPHER text. The seed becomes a portable artifact: “grow seed 7F3A91C2” is a thing one operator can hand another, and both decks render the same tree.

Proposal — cbonsai as a canonical Deckline ambient-mode generator seeded by Deck State

Concretely, propose a bonsai ambient generator in the nOSh ambient/screensaver roster:

• Default seed = Deck State. When the deck idles into ambient mode, the generator seeds from the current deck seed (cipher_seed or a dedicated ambient-seed field). The result: your deck grows your tree — the ambient scene is an identity artifact derived from the operator’s accumulated state, not a generic loop. A heavily-played deck and a fresh deck idle into visibly different trees.
• Seed-capture override. A captured seed (seed-capture mechanic) overrides the default, growing the scene that seed encodes. This is the gameplay tie-in: capturing a rare seed in play and watching what it grows is a small reward loop.
• Live growth, then hold, then regenerate — cbonsai’s --screensaver model: grow the tree with the animation budget, hold the finished frame, regenerate from an advanced seed. The LFSR advance between regenerations is the same advance deck-state.md describes for the CIPHER voice.
• Composes with ascii-effects.md: the tree can reveal via reveal:radial (“birth”) and clear via unreveal:radial between regenerations.

This makes the ambient mode part of the deck’s state-driven identity, not decoration — which fits the project’s standing position that the fiction and state are the differentiator.

Single-color adaptation

cbonsai colors branches vs leaves vs base by hue. KN-86 is monochrome amber on black, so the structure is carried by glyph choice and intensity, not color:

cbonsai element	KN-86 amber-only treatment
Trunk / branches	Box-drawing + diagonal glyphs (│ ╱ ╲ ┤ ├), full-amber
Leaves	Dense punctuation cluster (&, *, the high end of the ascii-effects.md ramp), brightened amber for canopy mass
Base / pot	Dim-amber box-drawing row
Depth / shading	Intensity steps within amber, not separate hues

cbonsai is already monochrome-friendly — the green→amber swap is trivial because the design never depended on multiple hues to read; it depended on character shape and density, which survive the palette collapse intact. On the device this renders against the 128×150 half-block canvas (ADR-0027) for the finer trunk/leaf strokes, with cell-level glyphs for the coarse structure — no pixel framebuffer needed.

Notes

• The seed→ambient determinism is the entry’s reason to exist. Park the screensaver mood as nice-to-have; the durable contribution is “Deck State seed → deterministic shareable ambient scene,” which reuses machinery deck-state.md already documents.
• GPL — reimplement, don’t vendor. Same posture as no-more-secrets. The growth algorithm (recursive branch with seeded RNG, life/multiplier params) is independently reimplementable against the deck’s LFSR.
• Cross-link terrain.md — the other seeded-procedural-generation reference in the corpus (fantasy maps); cbonsai is the ambient-animation sibling to terrain’s static-map generation. Both are seed-deterministic; both could one day be Deck-State-seeded.
• Cross-link ascii-effects.md — reveal/unreveal grammar for the grow/regenerate transitions.
• Cross-link the R4 neo / astroterm screensaver lineage (matrix-rain / star-field ambient) — cbonsai is the structured-growth counterpart to their motion-noise ambient; the nOSh ambient roster should carry both registers.
• Cross-link deck-state.md — the cipher_seed[4] LFSR + determinism guarantee that the seeded-ambient proposal stands on.