Strata is 10,000 generative pixel-art core samples. Each piece is an 8×8 grid of sediment: eight rock beds, eight grains wide, grown from a single SHA-256 seed. The idea is simple: time turns everyday activity into geology.
Every bed is made from one of 16 minerals, from Basalt and Shale to Malachite, Obsidian and Amber, with fine, medium or coarse grain. The rules are deterministic and transparent, so anyone can rebuild any piece from its seed.
Some beds hold fossils. Alongside trilobites, ammonites and ferns are fossils of modern life: a handset, an earbud, a key, a coin. Only 308 pieces (3.1%) carry a fossil, and just one, Strata #8523, holds two.
Strata also connect underground. When two cores share the same minerals at the same depths, they form a seam. Seams come in five tiers, from Seam to the single pair of Twin Cores: #2119 and #2494, two boreholes 375 tokens apart that hit the same seven layers of rock before splitting at the very bottom. No two Strata match all eight beds.
