Creatures of Habit

A real fruit fly brain connectome, running inside a game. Creatures of Habit uses mapped neurons and their connections from a fruit fly’s nervous system to simulate a brain that receives sensory input to control a physical fly in the game world. You can ride it, explore the world from its perspective, or watch its neural activity as it reacts to its surroundings. Take the reins Adventure mode is the main way to play. Climb aboard and guide your fly with a banana on a stick. Fly around, land on objects, walk along walls and explore familiar places at an unfamiliar scale. Keep the banana out to steer, or put it away and let your fly roam. Adventure combines the simulated brain with player controls and gameplay assistance to make exploring fun while the research side develops. [Image] Watch the brain work Open the neural overlay to see live activity from the simulation and a preview of what the fly’s eyes capture. Place scented food and experiment with how sensory inputs affect the network. The connectome is real data. Working out how to turn that data into a complete behaving animal is the ongoing experiment. [Image] Try the research modes Research modes focus on sensory input, neural activity and physical movement, without Adventure’s behavioral assistance. They are more limited because several behaviors are still being worked out. Landing, food seeking and other natural behaviors are active areas of development. Both research options retain the same neurons: • Lightweight Research removes many weaker synaptic connections to reduce the computing load. Adventure uses this lighter network too. • Full Research retains the unpruned connections and is much more demanding. Current testing has often run around 45 FPS even on an RTX 5090, though performance varies. Full Research is our most detailed network simulation, but it is still a model with assumptions and missing biology, not a finished digital fruit fly yet. A playable experiment Creatures of Habit is an evolving proof of concept. Adventure gives you a way to enjoy the fly now, while also helping develop the movement, animation and sensory systems used by the research modes. Come for the tiny mount. Stay to see what we can get its brain to do.