Tide Vault is a browser-based hydraulic memory chamber: a shallow field of water pulses through gates, carries silt, and slowly writes its own history into eroded channels.
The simulation runs as a Three.js system with a shallow-water heightfield, clamped timesteps, and live numerical metrics exposed through window.__tideVault.getMetrics(). Waves propagate across the basin while pressure and viscosity controls reshape the flow in real time.
The interface is built around direct perturbation. Pressure, viscosity, and gate-memory sliders mutate the running state, while keyboard-accessible pulse and reseed actions let the chamber be disturbed without resetting the whole scene.
The core feedback loop is sediment memory. Flow shear erodes and deposits silt, channel memory feeds back into drag and carving, and instanced gates plus silt tracers make the accumulating state visible as the basin finds new paths.
Deployed build: https://xpr0xy.github.io/daily-2026-05-01-tide-vault/