nullius

a chart of unclaimed lands

Sail an endless procedural archipelago drawn as a hand-engraved nautical chart. Every red pennant is a place nobody has named yet. Reach one, give it a name, and it is inked onto the chart — permanently, for every sailor who comes after you.

sail the chart →

https://github.com/miguelgarglez/nullius/assets/launch.mp4 · docs/launch.mp4

how it works

• The world is a seed. Terrain comes from hash-seeded value noise — fBm with domain warp under an archipelago mask — evaluated in integer arithmetic so every browser renders the identical coastline. Landmarks (islands, peaks, bays, capes, lagoons, rocks) are extracted deterministically per region cell, so a place exists at the same spot forever. A pinned determinism test guards the terrain math: if it ever drifted, existing names would orphan.
• The chart is engraved, not rendered. Marching-squares contours become double-struck coastlines; hills get hachure ticks; the sea gets soundings, rhumb lines and a compass rose. Tiles render at multiple LODs and crossfade as finer detail arrives — the paper never flashes placeholders.
• First writer wins. Names live in a shared Supabase ledger (nullius.claims, feature_key primary key, read-all/insert-only RLS). A race is settled atomically by the database: the loser's card keeps a durable "your name arrived too late" verdict beside the winner.
• Names are inscriptions, not tooltips. A claimed place keeps a survey benchmark on its exact point; its name inks in letter by letter on a quiet vellum clearing, wraps or shrinks to fit the chart, yields rather than overprints a neighbor, and is drawn after every mark so nothing crosses it.
• Other sailors are present. A Supabase realtime channel broadcasts each visitor's position as a small ship glyph on the chart, and the title margin counts the sailors abroad.

run it

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:5173

Without env vars it sails offline — the chart works, claiming waits for a ledger. To run against your own Supabase project:

1. Apply supabase/migrations/ in order. The second migration creates the live table in its own nullius schema (public.nullius_claims is the retired first ledger; a fresh install can safely skip migration one).
2. Expose the schema to the API: Dashboard → Settings → API → Exposed schemas, add nullius (keep public and graphql_public). Or with a Management API token: PATCH /v1/projects/<ref>/postgrest with {"db_schema":"public,graphql_public,nullius"}.
3. Then set the env vars:

cp .env.example .env.local   # or create it:
# VITE_SUPABASE_URL=https://<project>.supabase.co
# VITE_SUPABASE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY=<publishable key>

controls

input	action
drag / touch	sail (fast release carries momentum)
scroll / pinch	zoom
tap a red pennant	name that place
logbook	every reachable place in view, keyboard-operable
?	bring back the sailing notes
Esc	close whatever is open
#x,y,scale	shareable bearing — the ref on any plaque copies one

Honors prefers-reduced-motion (glides and the sink ceremony settle instantly), keeps every target ≥44px on a 375px screen, and stays readable when the ledger is unreachable — the chart keeps sailing offline and the form never loses what you typed.

stack

Vite + React + TypeScript, one canvas, zero map libraries. Supabase Postgres for the claims ledger (schema nullius of a shared project), realtime for presence and new inscriptions. A Cloudflare cron worker (keepalive/) reads one row once a day as a best-effort nudge against free-tier pausing — it helps, but Supabase can still pause an idle project — deploy it with npx wrangler deploy from keepalive/ after npx wrangler secret put SUPABASE_KEY. Deployed on Vercel.

a note on the film

docs/launch.mp4 was shot when the ledger ran elsewhere and shows a naming ("Cabo de la Primera Luz") that does not exist on this chart. The ledger was moved and started empty — every name you see now was left by a real sailor. The film stays because it still shows the ceremony faithfully.

MIT — sail on.