#DHSeaDev — Chrome MV3 — New Tab Extension
TabCritters
TabCritters is a Chrome new-tab extension where every new tab generates a unique creature — 4,096 deterministic seeds, five rarity tiers, eight elemental affinities. Fully offline, zero background script.
From the Chrome Web Store listing
How It Works
Deterministic Seeds
Each tab URL and position maps to one of 4,096 unique seeds via the mulberry32 PRNG. The same tab always generates the same critter.
Rarity Tiers
Five tiers from Common to Legendary, weighted by seed hash. Rare critters are genuinely rare.
Eight Affinities
Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Lightning, Ice, Shadow, and Light — affinity drives colour palette and visual personality.
Event Service Worker
Zero persistent background script. Wakes only on tab events — battery-friendly by design.
What was hard about it
Every critter has to look the same on every machine, forever, without storing a single image. TabCritters generates its creatures from a seed with a mulberry32 PRNG and draws them as deterministic SVG — 4,096 seeds across five rarity tiers and eight affinities, all reconstructed from the number rather than fetched.
The consequence is that a critter you found is not a record in a database somewhere. It is a function of its seed, so it renders identically whether you saw it today or reinstall the extension next year. The cost of that choice is that a critter can never be tweaked after the fact — changing the generator changes every creature that was ever generated.
The service worker is event-only. There is no background loop, because a new-tab collectible does not need one, and a worker that never wakes is a worker that never drains a battery.
The Chrome Web Store listing for this project has been retired. This page stays as the record of what shipped.
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Privacy Policy
This extension stores all data locally in your browser. No data leaves your device. No accounts, no telemetry, no analytics, no third-party services.
Contact: dhseadev@gmail.com