Zen Garden 2D: Sand Raking & Rock-Deflection Simulator

Rake

Teeth count 5

Tooth width 8px

Tooth spacing 10px

Groove depth 40%

Rocks

Garden

Garden State

Drag across the sand to rake it

Rocks placed

Raked coverage

How it works

This is the flat, top-down companion to the 3D zen garden simulator. The sand is a grid of height values, not a drawn line: every pass of the rake lowers the sand under each tooth and piles the displaced grains up along the tooth's edges, the way a real rake pushes sand sideways instead of erasing it. Shading is computed straight from the height field's slope, so the grooves and ridges read as raised relief under a fixed light.

Drop a rock and the raked lines curve around it instead of cutting straight through. Each tooth's direction of travel is deflected by a doublet field superposed on the rake's motion — the same potential-flow model used for ideal fluid flow around a cylinder — which is why the lines fan out into the concentric, radial pattern real zen gardens rake around their stones rather than just stopping at the rock's edge.

Drag to rake • toggle "Place rock" then click to add a stone • right-click a stone to remove it