Funny Tech

Delete a Crab, Flood the World

A game developer casually deleted some old crab data — and discovered the entire world's water level had been secretly balanced by crabs all along.

· 2 min · Togetter

What's going on

A game developer was doing some routine cleanup — deleting crab entities left over from the earliest days of development. Shortly after, they noticed something strange: the world's sea level was rising. Continuously. With no end in sight.

After digging through the code, they uncovered the truth: the game had two distinct types of crabs — ones that raise the water level, and ones that lower it. These two populations had been locked in perfect equilibrium, silently keeping the world's ocean in check. When the developer removed the crabs without a second thought, the water-raising side had nothing left to oppose it.

The thread went viral almost immediately, and the replies quickly turned into something between a philosophy seminar and a creation myth.

Comments

I casually deleted some crab data I’d made early in development, and suddenly the entire world’s water level started rising on its own. Turns out there were water-raising crabs and water-lowering crabs perfectly balancing each other out — and I just now realized that’s how I’d designed it.
Wait, what? WHAT?!
What in the what
“Water-raising crabs”… what does that even mean
That shouldn’t even be possible…
Sounds like the opening of a B-movie
You know those beach crabs that move with the waves — this is the case where the crabs came first
I’d get it if it were a game about increasing crabs, but then you wouldn’t delete the crabs — so what kind of game even is this
The world is upheld by crabs.
“In the beginning was the Crab, and the Crab was with the Sea, and the Crab was the Sea.”
Love a world that’s held together by crabs
This is the Gaia hypothesis. (The Gaia hypothesis proposes that Earth’s living organisms and their environment form a self-regulating system that sustains conditions for life — apparently crabs are included.)
Same as real life then
🦀 “Indeed.”
Why of all things does the fate of the world rest in the claws of crabs
So there were Groudon-type crabs and Kyogre-type crabs keeping things balanced…? (In Pokémon, Groudon expands the landmass and Kyogre expands the sea — the two are in eternal conflict, held in check only by Rayquaza.) Which makes the crabs a Rayquaza-type entity?
And God said, “Let there be Crabs.”
Did you cry “Let there be Crabs” before you created the sea?
This is literally mythology
Wait, is this mythology?
Sounds like a creation myth
I feel like there’s actually a myth out there like this somewhere
A new mythology has been born 🥺w

My take

Why crabs though... I mean, crabs are certainly important creatures, but still.

Comments loosely translated for tone.

Source https://togetter.com/li/2698639