A Launchpad Technology product
Glass Worlds · World 2 · In development
A simulated nest of the UK black garden ant, Lasius niger, dug into a block of garden soil under a paving slab. Slice the soil open, see the whole nest as a cast, and follow any ant to see its job. It runs on the real UK clock and season, and keeps growing on your desktop.
In development. No release date yet, and nothing to buy today.
Fig. 1 A schematic, not a render or screenshot. Layout simplified; depths not to scale. Chamber uses change as the colony moves things around.
First look · development build 0.3
Real captures from the working Antglass build, not illustrations. Workers run the pale, worn tunnel floors; the darker soil around them is the undug block. It is still in development, so expect it to change.
01 · Cut through
Real ants live out of sight. Antglass gives you two ways in, both planned for the first release.
Drag a plane through the block at any angle. The soil on your side disappears and the cut face shows the layers, roots and pebbles, with the live tunnels in cross-section and ants walking through them. Let go and it closes back up. Nothing is harmed.
Fig. 2a · diagram · planned feature
Fade the soil to glass and the whole nest stands out as one solid shape. It borrows a real field method: the myrmecologist Walter Tschinkel pours molten aluminium into ant nests, lets it cool, then digs the cast out of the ground. The casts show what was always there in the dark: vertical shafts, flat lens-shaped chambers, and different depths doing different jobs.
Fig. 2b · diagram · planned feature · ref: Tschinkel, Ant Architecture (Princeton University Press, 2021)
02 · Your colony
Your colony is saved on your machine and carries on from where it was. It follows the real UK date, the time of day and the season, so it is busiest on a warm June afternoon and almost still in January.
Founding
A mated queen seals herself into a small chamber and raises her first brood alone, living off her own reserves.
The first workers
About 8 to 10 weeks from egg to the first small workers. They take over the digging and the feeding.
A mature nest
Years later in the wild: thousands of workers, many chambers, trails out to the aphids. Start here if you want a busy colony on day one.
Adopt a mature colony that is busy from the first minute, or start a single founding queen and watch her nest take shape over the months it runs.
Real time is slow; a real nest is not dug in a minute. Press time-lapse to speed the clock up and watch tunnels open and trails form, then drop back to real time.
Fig. 3 · illustrative stages, not to scale. Growth timings are from published accounts of Lasius niger; the app's model is still being built.
03 · What they do
Black garden ant workers all look alike, with no soldiers or big-headed majors. The variety is in what they do, and that tends to change with age: young workers stay deep with the brood, older ones go outside.
Feeds and cleans the larvae, sorts them by size and carries eggs, larvae and cocoons to wherever the temperature suits them.
Bites out soil pellets and carries them up to the spoil crater. Chambers are not drawn in Antglass: they form from many diggers working the same spot.
Searches the garden, tends aphids for their sugary honeydew, and comes home with a swollen, striped belly to share the food mouth to mouth.
Waits at the entrance, checks who comes in, and raises the alarm when something that isn't a nestmate turns up.
A scout that finds food runs home dabbing a scent trail from the tip of its abdomen. Others follow it and add their own, so a good find turns into a highway while a poor one fades away. In one lab study, a black garden ant trail lasted about 47 minutes on average before it faded.
Turn on trail view and the trails show as fading ribbons, thicker where the traffic is heaviest, inside the nest and out across the garden.
ref: Springer, doi 10.1007/BF01201674 (L. niger trail lifetime)
Wild colonies often nest under paving slabs, which soak up the sun. Keepers and studies of related ants describe workers carrying the brood up into the warm by day and back down at night. In Antglass this movement is tied to the soil temperature, not to a timer.
Fig. 4 · diagram · evidence for Lasius as a genus; no controlled L. niger study found
04 · The UK year
Antglass reads today's date and plays the season a British garden colony would be living through right now.
Late Oct to Mar
The colony clusters deep around the queen and barely moves. The queen stops laying in autumn, so only larvae wait out the winter. No foraging.
Mar to Apr
When the soil warms past about 10 °C the colony stirs, the queen lays again, and the first foragers come out on warm, sunny days.
Sep to Oct
Brood rearing tails off, workers fill up on food, and the colony moves down into deeper chambers ready for winter.
05 · Living cycle
Living cycle is the Glass Worlds mode where each world runs its own cycle of life, threat and recovery. In Antglass, these arrive on their own, not on a script.
A predator wanders across the garden strip. Foragers scatter and the guards close ranks at the entrance.
It waits where the ants cross. Traffic thins on that trail until the danger passes.
Ants from another colony find the food. Guards meet them and the alarm spreads through the nest.
The soil darkens and some tunnels slump. Workers carry the brood up out of the wet, then start the repairs.
Ants keep a tidy nest. Dead nestmates, empty cocoon cases and scraps are carried out to a refuse pile away from the entrance.
Black garden ant queens are long-lived: around 15 years is often reported, and one kept in captivity lived about 28 to 29 years. The colony depends on her the whole time.
06 · Species file
The black garden ant is the one behind the sugar trails across British kitchen floors and the swarms on flying ant day. It is also one of the best-studied ants in Europe, which is why we chose it.
07 · Pricing
Antglass is not on sale yet. These are the proposed launch prices; we will confirm them before anything goes on sale, and the waitlist hears first.
Launch price — confirmingIn development
£4.99 / $6.49
One-off payment. UK price includes VAT.
Or get every world
Included in All Worlds. Antglass is part of All Worlds, lifetime: every world we publish in Glass Worlds, licensed for personal use on your own devices, for £39.99 ($52.99) one-off.
£19.99 for the first month after launch, then £39.99
It will also be in the planned British Nature collection of four worlds, £12.99. See every option.
Every price on this page is a proposal and may change before launch. Nothing here is a discount from an earlier price.
08 · Questions
No. Antglass is software: a simulated colony on your screen. There is nothing to feed, nothing to escape, and no animals are kept or harmed. The simulation is modelled on published research on the black garden ant.
We don't have a date. Antglass is in development, after Reefglass, the first Glass World. Join the waitlist and we'll email you when it goes on sale.
Like every world, it is planned as an offline file that opens in a modern browser and can be your Mac desktop wallpaper, and in the Glass Worlds Mac app, which will be free for everyone who has bought a world. We will publish the minimum Mac specification and a measured power figure before it goes on sale.
The digging, trails, jobs and seasons are built from published studies of Lasius niger and related ants. Where the research is thin, for example exact walking speeds, the app's info panel will say so rather than pretend.
That's the plan. The colony is saved on your Mac and, when you come back, it catches up on the time that has passed by the real clock. Start a new queen or a mature colony whenever you like.
No. Antglass is planned as its own purchase, and the Glass Worlds Mac app will be free for anyone who has bought a world. It is also included in All Worlds, if you want every world.
Launchpad Technology Ltd, a UK software company in Bourne, Lincolnshire. Questions: contactus@launchpadtechnology.co.uk or 0330 133 4432.
09 · Waitlist
One email when Antglass goes on sale, with the confirmed price, plus occasional Glass Worlds news. No spam, and you can leave with one click.