Name: BacFighT6 - Bacterial Battle
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: MarbuelB

BacFighT6: Bacterial Battle

Bring the microscopic battlefield of microbial warfare directly to your wrist. BacFighT6 is a real-time cellular automaton simulation for Garmin watches, inspired by the biological mechanisms of the Type VI Secretion System (T6SS) - a nanoscale molecular weapon that bacteria use to inject lethal toxins into neighboring cells.

Witness the fight for survival on a dynamically rendering hexagonal arena right on your watch screen.

The Combatants:

Attackers (Red): Armed with active T6SS machinery, Attackers fire toxins in random directions. You can configure their starting grid percentage, replication rates, firing cooldowns, and precision.

Prey (Blue): Peaceful but prolific, Prey cells focus on rapid replication to colonize the arena, serving as the primary targets for Attackers.

Defenders (Yellow): Highly strategic combatants. Defenders fire precise counter-retaliation toxin shots directly back at their attacker. Additionally, they can be configured with a random firing chance (0-10%), engaging in harmless "friendly fire" brawls with kin or hitting bystanders to simulate real-world spontaneous firing events!

How It Works:

The simulation runs step-by-step. Watch the visual indicators as cells fight for space:

Simulation Limits: The simulation runs up to a set step limit (default 120 steps). Once finished, the board pauses and displays a battle report card, allowing you to instantly clear and restart the battle with a single tap.

Replication: Live cells replicate into empty adjacent tiles when their division cooldowns reach zero.

Firing (Green Beams): Attackers and retaliating Defenders fire green T6SS beams. Firing precision determines whether Attacker shots land. Successful hits deliver a randomized amount of non-lytic (NL) and lytic (L) toxins.

Death and Lysis: Cells turn Dark Gray when killed by non-lytic damage, and Light Gray when lysing. Lysed cells eventually dissolve and disappear from the board, opening up space for new divisions.

Wrist Controls:

Play / Pause / Restart: Tap the screen (or press SELECT/ENTER) to play or pause the cell battle. Tapping after a completed simulation resets the board and starts a new simulation with mathematically scaled cell generation.

Configuration Menu: Press MENU (or long-press the screen) to open the settings.

Customizable Parameters (On the Fly):

Fine-tune the microscopic duel using hierarchical submenus categorized by cell type:

Arena Size: Change the hexagonal grid radius (from 2 to 10 rows).
Cell Population: Set exact percentages for Attackers, Prey, and Defenders. The simulation will proportionally scale them.
Simulation Steps: Adjust the automatic step limit (from 10 to 1000 steps).
Simulation Speed: Cycle tick delays from 50ms (hyper-speed) up to 2000ms.
Replication and Firing Cooldowns: Set division cooldown mean/variance for each cell type, and firing cooldown ranges for Attackers and Defenders.
Toxin Delivery and Thresholds: Configure the max toxins delivered per hit and adjust death/lysis thresholds for all three types.
Defender Random Firing: Set the chance for a defender to spontaneously misfire (from 0% up to 10.0%).

Biological Context:

This simulation is a watch-adapted version of the BacFighT6 research project developed by Prof. Dr. Marek Basler (University of Basel, Biozentrum). It models how T6SS-mediated contact killing, spatial structure, and defensive retaliation shape the survival and diversity of bacterial communities in nature. Learn more about T6SS and run large simulations here:
https://sites.google.com/view/bacfight6
https://www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/basler
