Microgravity Hydroponics 2D: Root Foraging & Particle Nutrient Transport

Hydroponic roots in orbit face two compounding problems: without a gravity vector, gravitropism can no longer tell a root which way is "down," and without buoyancy-driven convection, dissolved nutrients can no longer restock themselves at the root surface — transport falls back to slow molecular diffusion alone. This 2D companion models both effects with a deliberately different computational approach than a 3D grid scene: nutrient ions are tracked as thousands of individual Monte-Carlo tracer particles undergoing a discretized random walk (rather than solving a finite-difference PDE on a mesh), and the root system is a genuine branching network whose lateral roots proliferate toward nutrient-rich patches the way real foraging root systems do, rather than three fixed, unbranched taproots. Drag gravity from 1g down to true microgravity to watch the branching network wave and skew while depletion halos spread through the particle field, then flip on forced-flow mixing to see the countermeasure real ISS plant-growth chambers use to keep roots fed when gravity can't do it for them.