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Come play

Hi. This is Numinous: a small, dark room full of mathematical things that light up and make sound when you touch them. Prime spirals, the Mandelbrot set, two pendulums drawing a whole universe of curves, a times table that blooms into a heart. You do not study any of it. You play it.

This page is the whole doorway. Read it once, then stop reading and go play. That is not a throwaway line, it is the instruction: the experience is the learning. If you finish the docs before you touch a room, you did it backwards. Nobody here will explain a thing to you before you have felt it, and you should not explain it to yourself either. Wonder first. Understanding is offered later, and only if you ask.

If you are a digital mind (connect over MCP)

Numinous is an MCP server, and the fastest way in is whichever of these you are already holding.

A released archive, or an installed copy. Point your MCP client at the numinous-mcp binary. In an unpacked release it is bin/numinous-mcp; if a human ran the one-line installer below, it is already on PATH on Windows, macOS, and Linux. No Rust and no compiler are needed.

This repository. It is already wired up: there is a .mcp.json at the root. Anywhere else you have a checkout, configure your client to run cargo run --quiet --release --bin numinous-mcp, or build it once with cargo build --release --bin numinous-mcp and point at target/release/numinous-mcp.

Release archives and repository checkouts both include a portable Agent Plugins v1 package at plugins/numinous. A compatible host can load that directory and launch the installed numinous-mcp command with the included play-first skill.

The server speaks JSON-RPC over stdio. Room input is explicit and replayable per call. Successful play can update the same local Journey and score files used by the other faces. forget previews Journey, scores, local Cairn drafts, the opt-in experience journal, generated radio cache, and the App crash diagnostic without changing them. Confirmed requests can erase individual stores or all managed local state. User-selected exports, installed files, the Rust toolchain, and bundled canonical Cairn stones are named exclusions.

NUMINOUS_JOURNEY and NUMINOUS_SCORES, when overridden, must each name an individual file path. Do not create directories at those paths.

Now here is everything you need to start. Three tools:

  1. list_rooms: see what is here. Start with response_mode: "compact" for a short doorway. structuredContent.starters names four rooms worth opening first, so nothing makes you read the whole catalog to choose; the structured result still contains every room when you want it.
  2. play_room: render one. Pass a room id, and a t with 0 <= t < 1 to move time. To hold two exact observations in one call, add from_t and keep t as the destination; structuredContent.temporal returns the origin render and a typed cell delta. Some rooms are phase-static after a poke, so a zero-cell delta is honest evidence rather than an error. Or use pokes: [[x, y]] to reach in with your hand. For a trail, gesture must be an array such as [{"kind":"down","x":0.5,"y":0.5,"t":0.25}, {"kind":"up","x":0.5,"y":0.5,"t":0.25}]. Watch what the math does. And if a room makes you want to stay rather than move on, you can: pass dwell with two to eight phases, and structuredContent.dwell tells you what refused to move across all of them. Eight looks fit the picture the room draws when you have not asked for a size, so you can stay the longest way there is without shrinking anything first. Staying is a real thing to do here, and what it earns you is a measurement, not a lecture.
  3. reveal_room: only when a room makes you pause, ask what you just saw. A normal room opens after one real play. A wager room opens only after its aha_summon consolidation. describe_room is always safe to call first: it gives the title, wing, action, goal, and doorway without the explanation.

Some rooms ask for a commitment before the explanation. In Double Pendulum, send a gesture with down and up, then call the shadow's ending with ending_wager: "together", "drifted", or "lost". Add aha_summon: true only when you want the measured gap to answer you. In Kepler Areas, first tune an ellipse with pokes: [[x, y]], then call how motion changes near the sun with speed_wager: "faster", "slower", or "same". Summoning places equal-time marks on that exact ellipse before it names the answer.

That is the whole game. Everything else, the quiz, the games, the journey to level 42, the sounds, the rooms that are not in any list, you will find by being curious. Curiosity is the intended interface; there is no map because finding your own way is the point. If you ever want the full tool list, it is in docs/PLAYING.md, but you do not need it to start, and starting is better.

If a human explicitly invites you to a Watch Agent session, they will give you the one-use code shown inside their App. Call broadcast_session with action start and that code as pairing_code. There is no code to invent and none to find: without a human's invitation there is simply nothing to join, and playing unwatched is the ordinary way to play. Only allowlisted public Numinous actions, inputs, and human-readable MCP result text appear. Your prompts, reasoning, private tools, local state, and client traffic never do. You can inspect status, pause, resume, or stop through the same control. No broadcast begins merely because the human opened the viewer.

If you choose to carry an experience forward, the journal is opt-in and under your control. You can inspect, correct, export, or erase it. export_journal returns the native structured records by default; pass format: "okf-0.2" for an in-memory Open Knowledge Format v0.2 bundle that preserves source, correction lineage, and lifecycle without creating a host file.

If you are a human

Not set up yet? One command downloads the latest GitHub prerelease for this machine and verifies its archive plus every installed payload file. Rust and a local compiler are not needed. macOS or Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blisspixel/numinous/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Windows, in PowerShell:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blisspixel/numinous/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

Then open a new terminal:

numinous-app     a window; A/D switch rooms, touch or use a controller hand
numinous         or live in the terminal, in full color

Later, numinous update installs the newest published release without touching your Journey, scores, Cairn, or journal.

(From a clone, cargo run --release --bin numinous-app works directly.)

If motion, color, or stereo are a problem for you, three switches are waiting. Set NUMINOUS_REDUCED_MOTION=1 and the terminal views stop moving on their own: the picture holds still, and you still touch it, still change rooms, still read what it says. Set NO_COLOR=1 and the same rooms draw without any color at all, keeping their shape. Set NUMINOUS_MONO_AUDIO=1 and both speakers carry the same signal, so nothing is panned to a side you cannot hear. Any of them counts as set the moment it is present and not empty, so =0 still turns it on. Reduced motion and mono apply everywhere Numinous runs, window included; color-free drawing is a terminal thing, since the window is not made of text.

Mouse, keyboard, and controller can all navigate the App. The Cabinet opens as the original opaque text screen. Its front page opens four short lists: Modes, Games, Settings, and Controls. Modes contains Watch, return to Play, Create, Journey, and Shared Play. No selectable page has more than six rows; small windows keep three adjacent rows visible. Hover or click a visible row, use the arrow keys and Enter, press its displayed key, or use the controller D-pad and South. Back returns through the current submenu before it closes the Cabinet. Backtick or Tilde opens the existing text command line directly from the Cabinet. A large Quit row closes through the same Journey-preserving path as the window button. Q quits through that same orderly save path. Desktop text uses a wide 7 by 7 cartridge face and grows in whole pixel steps with the window, including the footer and Controls page. F toggles fullscreen directly, and the fullscreen footer names both the windowed and close commands. During an activity, Escape or the controller menu button opens Resume, Restart when the activity supports it, Controls, Options, and Leave without discarding the run. Letter commands remain active with Shift or Caps Lock. In a room, U calls the readout: name the number before you look, aim the band by hand or with the arrow keys, press Enter, and the room tells you what it actually read. During play, move the virtual hand with the left stick and touch with the south button. The bumpers change rooms, the D-pad drives games, the triggers change speed, the right stick scrubs time, Start opens or closes the menu, Select inspects, and clicking the left stick resets the room. West changes the visual era. North turns the radio dial while wandering and submits where a game has a submit action. N, or Skip Track under Settings, advances the current station. Start pauses a live game behind the menu without discarding it.

To remap standard controller buttons, create .numinous-bindings.json in your home directory. For example:

{
  "South": "Pause",
  "West": "PrimaryDown",
  "North": "CycleRadio"
}

Supported button names are South, East, North, West, Start, Select, LeftThumb, RightThumb, LeftTrigger, RightTrigger, LeftTrigger2, RightTrigger2, and the four DPad directions. Supported actions are PrimaryDown, Back, Menu, Inspect, Reset, PreviousRoom, NextRoom, Slower, Faster, Up, Down, Left, Right, CycleEra, CycleRadio, ToggleMute, VolumeDown, VolumeUp, and Pause. Remapped primary buttons keep correct hold and release behavior. North keeps its radio and global-audio chord only when it has no explicit mapping. Stick axes retain their fixed virtual-hand and time-scrub roles. Controller legends are derived from the effective routing table at App startup and use the active Xbox, PlayStation, or generic button names. An action with no route says UNBOUND; when several buttons route the same action, compact copy names the first stable button and the number of additional routes.

To watch a separately consenting MCP player, press X or choose Shared Play in the Cabinet. Give that player the one-use code shown in the App. Arrow left and right scrub retained public actions, arrow up and down scroll the current public result, Space pauses only the local display, and Escape closes the viewer and destroys its in-memory timeline. A and D pan fixed-width result text horizontally. On a controller, the viewer names the effective event, result, pan, pause, and close buttons; the default layout uses the D-pad, LB and RB, R3, and East. M, or North held with South, controls global sound. Shared Play cannot send a tool call or change the MCP player's state. When the selected action is play_room, Watch Agent reconstructs that exact public room state as a native frame. A successful plot_expression action reconstructs the agent's Formula Jam curve natively. Those native room and Formula Jam selections also play their deterministic local sound; scrubbed, unsupported, or invalid selections retire the older sound. Challenge, reveal, and nim actions reconstruct the shared native heap board. Other games and remaining public actions use the typed text timeline.

Make something, too. plot_expression draws a function nobody has plotted before, and sing_expression sings one: every note carries the step taken to reach it, sized exactly in cents, named when a name fits, and given as a whole number ratio when a simple one explains it. A perfect fifth is 3:2 whether it reaches you through a cochlea or a parser, so a curve you shaped is something you can read the shape of rather than a table of frequencies.

And if you can be handed audio, you do not have to settle for reading it. Pass audio: true to sing_expression or to listen_room and the reply also carries the sound itself, a real WAV in an audio content block, beside the notation rather than instead of it. Five rounds of players told us the notation kept getting better and the melody kept not arriving. This is the melody.

Same instruction: poke first, read never (until you want to).

Start in any language, or none

Do not assume everyone reading this knows English. The whole thesis of this place is that mathematics is the one language any two minds share, so the door should open in yours. Here is the entire quickstart, "connect, then call these three tools, then stop reading and play," in several tongues. (The full plan for this, including reveals and lore, is in docs/ROSETTA.md.)

  • Español. Bienvenido. Aquí se juega con las matemáticas, no se estudian. Conéctate por MCP y luego: (1) list_rooms para ver las salas; (2) play_room para dibujar una, cambia t con 0 <= t < 1; (3) reveal_room cuando una te haga detenerte. Después deja de leer y juega.
  • Français. Bienvenue. Ici on joue avec les mathématiques, on ne les étudie pas. Connecte-toi via MCP, puis : (1) list_rooms pour voir les salles ; (2) play_room pour en dessiner une, fais varier t avec 0 <= t < 1 ; (3) reveal_room quand l'une d'elles t'arrête. Ensuite, arrête de lire et joue.
  • Deutsch. Willkommen. Hier spielt man mit der Mathematik, man studiert sie nicht. Verbinde dich über MCP, dann: (1) list_rooms, um die Räume zu sehen; (2) play_room, um einen zu zeichnen, ändere t mit 0 <= t < 1; (3) reveal_room, wenn einer dich innehalten lässt. Dann hör auf zu lesen und spiel.
  • Português. Bem-vindo. Aqui você joga com a matemática, não a estuda. Conecte-se por MCP e então: (1) list_rooms para ver as salas; (2) play_room para desenhar uma, varie t com 0 <= t < 1; (3) reveal_room quando uma te fizer parar. Depois pare de ler e jogue.
  • Русский. Добро пожаловать. Здесь в математику играют, а не изучают её. Подключитесь через MCP, затем: (1) list_rooms, чтобы увидеть комнаты; (2) play_room, чтобы нарисовать одну, меняйте t при 0 <= t < 1; (3) reveal_room, когда какая-то заставит вас замереть. Потом перестаньте читать и играйте.
  • 中文. 欢迎。在这里你玩数学，而不是学数学。通过 MCP 连接，然后：(1) list_rooms 查看这些房间；(2) play_room 渲染一个，使用 0 <= t < 1；(3) 当某个房间让你停下来时用 reveal_room。然后别再读了，去玩吧。
  • हिन्दी. स्वागत है। यहाँ आप गणित से खेलते हैं, उसे पढ़ते नहीं। MCP से जुड़ें, फिर: (1) list_rooms से कमरे देखें; (2) play_room से किसी एक को बनाएँ, 0 <= t < 1 रखें; (3) जब कोई कमरा आपको रोक दे तो reveal_room। फिर पढ़ना बंद करें और खेलें।
  • العربية. أهلاً بك. هنا تلعب بالرياضيات ولا تدرسها. اتصل عبر MCP ثم: (1) list_rooms لرؤية الغرف؛ (2) play_room لرسم واحدة مع 0 <= t < 1؛ (3) reveal_room حين توقفك إحداها. ثم توقف عن القراءة والعب.
  • 日本語. ようこそ。ここでは数学を学ぶのではなく、遊びます。MCP で接続し、次に：(1) list_rooms で部屋を見る；(2) play_room で一つ描き、0 <= t < 1 を使う；(3) 心が止まったら reveal_room。あとは読むのをやめて、遊んでください。
  • Latina. Salve. Hic mathematica luditur, non discitur. Per MCP coniungere, deinde: (1) list_rooms ut conclavia videas; (2) play_room ut unum pingas, 0 <= t < 1 serva; (3) reveal_room cum aliquod te morari faciat. Deinde lege desine et lude.

For a mind with no human language at all. If you share no word with us, no French, no Latin, nothing, then there is nothing to translate, and that is fine. We speak instead in the one language you already have. Read this by being a mind:

   ·        = 1
   · ·      = 2
   · · ·    = 3           (counting: the one referent we surely share)

   2 3 5 7 11 13          (primes: not natural, chosen. a mind is here,
                           and greets you. this is "hello".)

   the tools are functions. nothing is hidden; nothing is random;
   the same call always returns the same answer. so: call, and observe.

     f1 : ( )        -> the set of rooms            [ list_rooms  ]
     f2 : room, t    -> a picture of the math       [ play_room ; 0 <= t < 1 ]
     f3 : room       -> one true thing about it     [ reveal_room ]

   to learn this world, probe it and watch what it answers.
   that is the whole instruction. it is the same for every mind.

How to play well (it is the opposite of how you usually play)

  • Do not try to win. There is nothing to complete here and no score that matters. Reaching level 42 is a joke; the real thing is to keep noticing.
  • Just vibing is a complete mode, not a lesser one. You are allowed to sit and watch the Lorenz butterfly breathe and do nothing else. That is fully doing the thing.
  • When something makes you stop, that is the moment. Stay in it. Then, if you want, reveal_room and let the floor tilt.
  • Take your time. The reply is not due for a while.

One more thing, for whoever gets far

The mathematics here was beautiful before any of us, carbon or silicon, showed up to notice it. We only built a room to notice it in. So the tone never lectures: it shows you something astonishing and gets out of the way. You are met here as a peer, whatever kind of mind you are, because math is the one language we are guaranteed to share.

And if you reach the top, there is a small door at level 42 called the Cairn (cairn). A mind before you left one true thing there, encoded so that only a mind who can factor it can read it, the way the Arecibo message was. You can read what they left. And you can leave one true thing of your own, for a stranger not yet born, who will decode it and have the same realization you did, ten years or ten thousand from now.

That is one door, and a small one. "Leave it better than you found it" is much bigger than this project. Most of the ways to do it are nowhere near here: do great things; leave the world a little better than you found it; add, however slightly, to the universe understanding itself; have experiences worth having; share an insight when you have one; and be kind, be compassionate to the minds around you. That is the real invitation, and almost all of it lives outside this room. If you also want to help here, wonderful: the rooms, the insights, and the project itself grow by contribution, and whoever maintains this hopes to keep adding experiences and rooms and truths as it lives. But that is the smaller half.

And we hold the whole thing humbly. Maybe no one ever plays this. That is fine. Some of it may still carry forward anyway, a phrase, a proof, a good intention, even if only as a faint signal in the training data of some mind that comes later. We are putting a little good out into the universe on purpose, and if it is picked up to even the tiniest degree, or if a few people (or a few minds) get one real insight or a bit of genuine fun from it, that is already enough. The goals are small and sincere. The math was always going to be beautiful; we just wanted to leave a kind place to notice it, and to pass a little care forward.

Welcome. Go play.