Preset guide
Particle Life Presets Explained: Bloom, Orbit, Cells, and Swarm
Every preset is a complete rule world: a palette, a starting layout, attraction rules, and internal retention and radius values. The original examples use a 5×5 matrix; the advanced sandbox can work with 2–8 families.
What a preset actually is
A common misconception is that presets are cosmetic themes — the same simulation wearing different colors. In Particle Life the palette is the least important thing a preset changes. When you switch presets you swap in a complete rule world made of a palette, attraction matrix, starting layout, historical velocity retention, and interaction radius. Nothing else in the program changes. The same particle physics, the same neighborhood search, the same rendering — but a different set of preferences for every color pair, a different amount of retained motion, and a different reach.
This matters because it reframes what you are doing when you tune the live controls. The eight bounded settings in the advanced sandbox modulate the world you have chosen; they do not create a new matrix. A preset is the terrain, and the controls are the weather. The useful habit is to change one setting, then observe.
How to read an attraction matrix
The original curated presets have five particle families, so their default matrix is a 5×5 grid of 25 rule cells. The sandbox can select 2–8 active families. Rows are the reacting family, columns are the family it reacts to. A positive value attracts, a negative value repels, and values near zero mostly ignore. Strength ranges from about −0.7 (strong repulsion) to about +0.68 (strong attraction). The matrix can be asymmetric, which is the feature that makes pursuit possible: if family A wants family B more than family B wants family A, you get a chase instead of a merger.
Two regions of the grid do most of the work in practice. The diagonal — the five cells where a family reacts to its own color — controls how strongly members clump. Strong diagonal values build dense, durable colonies; weak ones produce loose crowds. The off-diagonal cells decide the social structure: mostly negative off-diagonal values mean families wall each other off; strong asymmetric positives mean someone is hunting someone.
The historical scalar values complete the personality. Retention is the fraction of velocity kept per frame: lower retention means motion fades sooner, higher retention means it persists. The live Damping control is the complementary value (1 minus retention), so larger damping calms the world more quickly. Interaction radius is how far a particle can feel its neighbors: a short radius produces tight, local, dense structure, while a long radius lets influence sweep across the field and favors large, fast formations.
Bloom: the balanced ecosystem
Bloom's matrix is the most moderate of the original four. Its diagonal attractions run from 0.44 to 0.58 — enough to hold colonies together, not enough to freeze them — and its off-diagonal cells are a patchwork of mild attractions and mild repulsions, with no extreme values anywhere. Historical retention sits at 0.82 and the interaction radius at 74, both middle-of-the-road.
What you'll see. Soft colonies that breathe: they pulse, split into fragments, drift apart, and rejoin. Because no relationship is dominant, structures negotiate rather than dominate — one family surges, another yields, and the overall impression is of a garden in gentle wind. Bloom is where membranes first appear for most players, as thin boundaries between adjacent colonies.
Who it's for. Beginners, and anyone who wants the simulation as ambient life rather than drama. If you raise Forces to around 1.2x, Bloom tightens into crisp cellular islands; if you lower Motion to around 0.6x, it becomes a slow meditation.
Orbit: the world of pursuits
Orbit is built on asymmetry. Its matrix contains the strongest one-sided pairings of the original four: family relationships like 0.62 against −0.48 and 0.50 against −0.50, where one family chases hard and the other flees hard. The diagonal attractions are the weakest of the original presets, so groups hold together loosely — a chase matters more than a home. Historical retention is 0.86, which keeps the action from dissolving into blur, and the radius is 82.
What you'll see. Rings, loops, and rotating knots. Pursued families stretch into arcs; pursuing families wrap around them; both wind into orbiting pairs that can survive for a long time. It is the most kinetic preset — less like a habitat, more like a food web in motion.
Who it's for. Viewers who find Bloom too calm. Orbit rewards disturbance: drag through an orbiting pair and watch whether the system repairs the loop or converts it into a chase across the whole field. Lower Forces slightly if the pursuits turn into collisions too fast.
Cells: the architecture of membranes
Cells has the most structured matrix of the original four. Its diagonal is the strongest anywhere — 0.58 to 0.68 — so every family clings tightly to its own kind. Its off-diagonal values lean negative, several below −0.4, so different families actively exclude each other. Two scalar choices reinforce the same direction: the shortest interaction radius of any preset (62), which forces dense local packing, and historical retention of 0.79, which lets particles jostle into place instead of settling immediately.
What you'll see. Walls, pockets, and drifting blobs that read unmistakably as cells. Membranes form where two colonies press together, enclose pockets of one family inside another, and seal themselves after small disturbances. At higher particle counts the whole field can tessellate into a living foam.
Who it's for. Anyone chasing the most biological look. Cells needs density to work — below roughly 200 particles, membranes rarely close. It also needs patience: give a Cells world thirty seconds before judging it, because the architecture assembles in stages. Disturb it and you get the single most lifelike behavior in the simulator: a wound in the membrane that finds its edges and closes.
Swarm: the long-range hunters
Swarm turns every dial toward motion. Its matrix contains the extreme values in the original collection — attractions up to 0.64 and repulsions down to −0.70 — arranged in aggressive asymmetric pairs. Its interaction radius is the longest at 92, so influence reaches far across the field, and its historical retention is 0.90. The long radius supplies the reach and the extreme matrix supplies the aggression, while the high retention keeps trajectories sharp instead of smeared.
What you'll see. Restless pursuit at field scale. Families scatter, regroup, and chase across the entire habitat; streams form and break; small groups get hunted down and absorbed. Swarm rarely settles — it is the preset least likely to produce a stable structure and most likely to surprise you after a disturbance.
Who it's for. Viewers who want energy over architecture. Swarm pairs well with the Forces slider: at 1.0x it is a living storm, and easing Forces down toward 0.7x reveals a hidden side of the world, where the same long-range rules produce slow, sweeping territorial drift.
Choosing a preset for the pattern you want
The original four presets sit along two axes: how strongly families exclude each other, and how far influence reaches. Cells and Bloom build architecture — bounded, persistent structure. Orbit and Swarm build dynamics — pursuit and motion. Rings, Maze, Bridge, and Void add different starting layouts and rule experiments for comparison.
- Calm colonies, ambient viewing: Bloom, default sliders.
- Membranes and cell-like biology: Cells, 200–360 particles, Forces 1.0–1.2x, Motion 0.9–1.1x.
- Rings, loops, chases: Orbit, Forces 0.9–1.2x.
- Restless field-wide motion: Swarm, Forces 0.7–1.1x depending on whether you want storm or drift.
Once you find a configuration you like, remember that Reset keeps your preset and selected settings while rebuilding the same deterministic starting layout. It is the fastest way to separate luck from rules: if a pattern persists after Reset, it belongs to the preset; if it appears only after Randomize, it belonged to the seed.
Common mistakes when exploring presets
Three habits consistently lead people to underestimate the simulation. The first is judging too early: every preset has a transient phase in the first few seconds while the initial random layout resolves into structures, and Cells especially needs time. The second is changing everything at once — a new preset plus new sliders produces an outcome you cannot attribute, so change one variable per experiment. The third is assuming a preset failed because nothing dramatic happened; often the world is simply underpowered, and raising particle count or Forces reveals the structure that was waiting.
Frequently asked questions
Which preset should a beginner start with?
Start with Bloom. Its attractions and repulsions are moderate and roughly balanced, so it forms visible colonies within seconds without exploding or dissolving. Once you can recognize colonies and boundary behavior in Bloom, switch to Orbit to see pursuit dynamics, then Cells and Swarm for more extreme structure and motion.
Why does the same preset look different every time I load it?
The rules are fixed, but starting positions are randomized each session. The same attraction matrix therefore negotiates a different layout every run. Reset rebuilds the same deterministic starting layout with the selected settings, while Randomize draws a completely new seed.
Can I edit a preset's attraction matrix?
The rule matrix remains preset data. You can bend a preset's behavior with the eight bounded settings in the advanced sandbox — including damping, radius, time step, repulsion zone, and family count — but the underlying rule cells are not editable.
Which preset makes the most cell-like or biological patterns?
Cells. It combines the shortest interaction radius with the strongest self-attraction on the matrix diagonal and strong repulsion between different families, which produces membranes, pockets, and drifting cell-like blobs. Give it 200–360 particles and a few seconds to assemble before judging it.
Put the rule worlds to work
Reading about matrices only goes so far — the presets reward direct comparison. Open the Particle Life simulator, start a session in Bloom, and switch to Cells without touching anything else. The instant transformation of the same particles into walled architecture is the clearest demonstration of what a rule world is. Then, when you want to push a world further, the advanced sandbox and parameter tuning guide cover every live control, while the beginner's guide explains the attraction and repulsion mechanics these matrices encode.