Docs / the setting, the numbers and the arithmetic
Docs
A data floor that was written off and never cleared out, and the 4,444 cats still working it.
Everything below is either the setting or the numbers behind it. Nothing here is a promise, and none of it is a reason to buy anything.
Nobody switched it off
The decommission order went through on a Tuesday. Someone in an office several buildings away signed a form, the sub-level came off the asset register, and that was the end of it as far as anyone upstairs was concerned.
The power stayed on. That part was an oversight, or a billing arrangement nobody wanted to unpick, or both. Either way the racks kept drawing current, the aisles kept their temperature, and the indicator lights kept doing what indicator lights do.
The cats were already there. They had been there long enough that nobody could say who let them in, and the answer had stopped being interesting by the time anyone thought to ask.
There are 4,444 of them.
What the work is
A cat picks up a component at one end of an aisle and carries it to another. That is the whole of it.
Where a component goes is decided by the cat carrying it. There is no rota, no ticket queue, nothing to log against. The pile at the far end never gets shorter, and nobody has established whether it is supposed to.
The work is real in the sense that it happens. Whether it accomplishes anything is a separate question, and one the floor is not equipped to answer.
Departments
A cat is filed by what it carries. That is its department, and it is the only job description anyone kept.
Memory carries RAM. Backup power carries a cell that holds the room up for about four minutes, which is long enough to shut something down properly and not long enough for anything else. Thermal carries a fan and is the only department doing visibly hard work. Storage splits into spinning and solid state, and the two do not mix, for reasons neither will explain.
Network carries the router. Everything passes through it. Nobody thanks it.
Render carries the GPU and gets the interesting jobs. Compute carries the CPU and takes the blame. Power distribution carries the PSU, which turns the wall into the work and is therefore the most important thing in the building, a fact it mentions.
Backplane carries the motherboard. There are 124 of them. Everything plugs into a backplane, including the parts that think they are more important, and Backplane is aware of this.
Rack operations carries a server blade. Enterprise grade, three owners deep, the asset tag from the second owner still stuck to the side.
The ones carrying nothing
1,577 cats carry nothing at all.
They are filed as unassigned, which is not the same as idle. The floor still needs walking. Doors that have no reason to be open are found open. Something has to notice, and the departments are busy.
Nobody has worked out how a cat becomes unassigned, or whether it is a posting or a choice. Ask a department cat about it and you get a shrug. Ask an unassigned one and you get nothing, which is either an answer or the absence of one.
Two things nobody wants
Seventy-five cats carry a floppy disk. 1.44 megabytes, last read in 2003, contents unknown and likely to remain so. There is no drive on the floor that can open one. The cats carrying them know this. They carry them anyway.
Forty cats carry a CRT monitor.
Ninety pounds of glass and nowhere to put it. It cannot be plugged into anything down here. It is heavier than the cat. Moving one requires stopping every few metres, and the stopping is not dignified.
Nobody assigned these. Nobody has taken them away either. There is an argument on the floor about whether carrying a CRT is a punishment or a status, and the argument has been running long enough that both sides have stopped listening.
Forty out of 4,444. Make of that what you like.
The green screen
Roughly one cat in a hundred stands somewhere the light works differently.
Behind them the wall is black and running. Ones and zeroes falling in columns, at a rate nobody has timed. It is not a display. There is no panel and no housing. It is the wall.
The cats who stand there do not comment on it. They are not treated differently by the others, and they do not appear to think they should be. They just happen to be standing where the wall is doing that.
If there is an explanation, it is on a floor above this one, in a document that came off the register with everything else.
The floor still draws power
Somebody is paying for this. Not deliberately, and not in a way anyone upstairs could point to on a bill, but the current arrives and the racks take it.
The cats have worked out that being connected is different from being present. A cat standing in an aisle is on the floor. A cat that has put something of its own into the work is on the mains, and the difference shows: their indicators run, and they are the ones the floor pays attention to.
What it costs to get on the mains is the thing you cannot get back. That is the whole of the arrangement and the cats seem to consider it fair, which is more than can be said for most arrangements down here.
What we do not know
Who let them in.
Why the power was never cut.
What the pile at the end of the aisle is for, and whether the number of things in it has ever changed.
Whether the cats understand that the building was written off, and if they do, whether it would alter anything.
Whether being on the mains is worth what it costs, which is a question the floor has not settled either.
The last two come up most. They both have the shape of questions with answers, which is probably why people keep asking them.
Reference / counted from the run
Components
Every cat carries one component or nothing. Counted across all 4,444.
| Component | Department | Count | Share | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Empty paws | Unassigned | 1577 | 35.5% | Common |
| RAM | Memory | 423 | 9.5% | Common |
| Battery cell | Backup power | 379 | 8.5% | Common |
| Fan | Thermal | 354 | 8.0% | Common |
| SSD | Storage, solid state | 285 | 6.4% | Uncommon |
| HDD | Storage, spinning | 258 | 5.8% | Uncommon |
| Router | Network | 242 | 5.4% | Uncommon |
| GPU | Render | 224 | 5.0% | Uncommon |
| CPU | Compute | 177 | 4.0% | Rare |
| PSU | Power distribution | 165 | 3.7% | Rare |
| Motherboard | Backplane | 124 | 2.8% | Rare |
| Server blade | Rack operations | 121 | 2.7% | Epic |
| Floppy disk | Archive, cold storage | 75 | 1.7% | Epic |
| CRT monitor | Display, decommissioned | 40 | 0.9% | Legendary |
Tiers
Measured after the fact, not assigned. A token's tier comes from all thirteen layers together.
| Tier | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Common | 2239 | 50.38% |
| Uncommon | 1318 | 29.66% |
| Rare | 679 | 15.28% |
| Epic | 171 | 3.85% |
| Legendary | 37 | 0.83% |
Forms
A form takes the body over. When it is anything but Housecat it replaces the coat and cancels the pattern, and those layers are left out of the token entirely rather than recorded and ignored.
| Form | Count | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Housecat | 4231 | 95.21% | An ordinary cat. Fur and pattern roll normally. |
| Chrome | 81 | 1.82% | Polished. Takes over the coat entirely. |
| Ghost | 64 | 1.44% | Partly transparent. You can see the rack through it. |
| X-ray | 48 | 1.08% | Ribs visible. Nobody has explained this one. |
| Solid gold | 13 | 0.29% | Exactly what it says. |
| Binary | 7 | 0.16% | Made of the wall. Always stands on the green screen. |
Layers
Thirteen, resolved in a fixed order against the seed.
| Layer | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Background | The field behind the cat. Flat colour, except one. |
| Fur | Coat colour. Two tones, no shading ramp. |
| Form | Overrides fur and pattern when it is not Housecat. |
| Pattern | Markings on the coat. |
| Ears | Shape and condition. Some are notched. |
| Eyes | Shape of the eye. |
| Eye colour | Nine of them, including one heterochromia. |
| Mouth | Expression. |
| Headwear | Hats, helmets, and one heatsink crown. |
| Eyewear | Glasses, visors, one eyepatch. |
| Neckwear | Collars, harnesses, one gold chain. |
| Held rig | The component. This decides the department. |
| Effect | Sparks, static, thermal shimmer. Mostly nothing. |
How a cat is made
Every cat is thirty-two pixels square. Thirteen layers resolve in a fixed order against a seed, and the same seed gives the same cat on any machine, forever. Nothing was drawn twice and nothing was drawn by hand after the fact.
There are 110 trait variants across the thirteen layers, which comes to 709,765,410,816 possible cats. 4,444 of them exist.
Each cat animates across ten frames at roughly one second a loop. Four channels run on every cat: a breathing shift, an ear twitch, a blink, and the frame counter that animated traits read from. Fans turn. Screens flicker. Indicator lights cycle.
How rarity was decided
It was not decided. It was measured.
Every trait carries a weight. The generator samples itself twenty thousand times at load, sorts the resulting probabilities, and reads the tier cut-offs off its own distribution at the 1st, 5th, 20th and 50th percentiles. Change any weight and the tiers recalibrate themselves on the next run.
This means the bands describe what the collection actually became rather than what anyone hoped it would be. It also means a cat's tier comes from all thirteen layers together, not from any single trait.
Why the part band is not the cat's tier
The component roster below lists a band for each part. That band describes the part, not the cat holding it.
Plenty of cats carrying a CRT are Common, because everything else about them is ordinary. Plenty of Legendaries are carrying nothing at all. If you are reading rarity, read the tier on the token, not the department.
The binary field
Every Legendary stands on the same background: black, with ones and zeroes falling behind it. That is not a trait you can chase. It is what the top of the collection looks like.
It can also turn up on its own, rolled like any other background, at roughly one in fifty. Those cats are not Legendary. They are just standing somewhere unusual.
The arithmetic / what a cat is worth
The whole sum, on one page
Worked through with one set of numbers so the shape is clear. None of the three inputs is a promise: the volume is whatever people trade, and the total load is whatever everybody else has burned.
| If the collection is | A full Legendary's share | At $500k volume | At $2M volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2% commissioned | 8.643% | $583 | $2,334 |
| 15% commissioned | 1.152% | $78 | $311 |
| 35% commissioned | 0.494% | $33 | $133 |
| 70% commissioned | 0.247% | $17 | $67 |
The first row is the uncomfortable one and it is on the page for that reason. The same burn is worth seventeen times more at 2% than at 35%, so early figures are not representative of later ones and we would rather say so here than have it found out. If nobody trades BCAT, every number in that table is zero.
What rarity is worth
Rarity raises the ceiling, not the rate. Every unit of load pays the same wherever it sits, so no cat is ever a worse deal per BCAT burned — a rarer one simply holds more before it is full.
| Tier | Cats | BCAT to fill | With a rig | Against a Common |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Common | 2,239 | 40,000 | 80,000 | 1.0× |
| Uncommon | 1,318 | 60,000 | 120,000 | 1.5× |
| Rare | 679 | 100,000 | 200,000 | 2.5× |
| Epic | 171 | 200,000 | 400,000 | 5.0× |
| Legendary | 37 | 500,000 | 1,000,000 | 12.5× |
If every cat in the collection were filled to its cap, 289,240,000 BCAT would have been burned — 28.9% of the entire supply, gone. That will never happen, but it is the ceiling, and it sits on top of the 0.90% of every trade that the fee burns anyway.
Why the ceiling and not the rate
The obvious way to reward rarity is to pay rarer cats at a higher rate. It breaks the
economy. If a Legendary earned twenty times a Common per unit of load, a Common holder
would need to burn twenty times as much BCAT for the same return, and nobody would ever
commission one — 2,239 cats, half the collection, would become pointless to use.
Capping instead keeps every cat worth the same per BCAT burned. Rarity buys you a
bigger ceiling, and a full Common is full forever, which is the whole reason to want a
second cat.
Project / where things stand
Roadmap
Five phases, in order. The one currently running is marked, and it reads the same setting that drives the front page, so the two cannot disagree. Each entry says what closes it, because a phase without a condition is a wish.
Token
A note on all of this: it is a setting, not a promise. Nothing about owning a Binary Cat depends on any of it being true, and none of it is a reason to buy one. It exists because 4,444 pixel cats carrying computer parts wanted explaining, and this was the explanation that fit.
The numbers on this page are counted from the finished run and will not change. Everything about charge, the mains and the vault is described on the utility page and is not built yet. Contract addresses appear on this site the day they exist and nowhere before.