Pheromone · The colony below
Every ant is drawn on a 32×32 grid as one continuous silhouette: head, thorax, a pinched waist, gaster, and three pairs of legs that stay edge-connected so they read as legs and not as crumbs. Six trait categories make 34,560 possible ants. 3,000 were excavated.
A tunnel wall, drawn live from the same trait data the collection was generated from — reload for a new dozen.
All 3,000 free. Three ants per wallet.
The entire supply is a free mint — the contract takes no payment of any kind, so a minter spends gas and nothing else. What it asks for is history: a wallet that had already sent more than ten transactions on Robinhood Chain at the snapshot block mints up to three. Sent, not received — being airdropped into does not count. A wallet under that has no way in, paid or otherwise.
The $PHERO airdrop asks a wallet to hold 5, which the mint alone cannot give you — the last two have to come from another holder.
Counted, not estimated.
Trait counts are not sampled and then hoped over. The generator fills an exact quota bag per category, shuffles, zips the bags together, then repairs duplicate ants by swapping a single value between two tokens, which leaves every count untouched. Draw-and-discard was tried first and rejected: it quietly inflates rare traits, because common combinations get drawn and thrown away more often. On this collection it nearly doubled the Legendaries.
Six categories, and what each one is worth.
Percentages are the designed weights. The realised counts across the 3,000 land on them exactly.
Three Legendaries, thirty ants each.
One percent apiece. Ninety ants carry at least one, which is three percent of the colony. The rule the whole rarity table follows is that the loudest trait should be the rarest: a full-face visor worn by a quarter of the collection is not rare, it is just the collection.
One source of truth, no second copy of the art.
The ants are not stored as images. They are stored as a 32-row base
grid plus coordinate lists per trait, and every trait lists only its left half
— the renderer mirrors column c to 31-c, and anything
deliberately lopsided goes in a separate list.
The generator does not hold its own copy of that data. It slices the
trait region out of the design lab and runs it, so the PNGs cannot drift from the
preview. The whole colony rebuilds from seed 20260812 in about ten
seconds, and rebuilds identically every time.
Honest status, no roadmap theatre.