TITLE
ARES-HORT Console — Greenhouse B

PROMPT
The operations console of a fictional Mars greenhouse, displayed on an amber monochrome CRT terminal from an imagined 1980s-style spacefaring future. A dense character-cell dashboard: everything is text, box-drawing characters and block-element graphics on an 80-column grid, glowing amber. Clearly fictional telemetry simulated in the page. Concept: a dashboard as a vintage computer interface, where the plants themselves are drawn in characters and visibly grow.

Mood: lonely, competent, dryly funny; sol 412 of a long posting. Palette: tube black-brown #0A0600, amber phosphor #FFB000, hot highlight orange #FF6A00 for alarms and the cursor, dim amber #5A3A00 for inactive text and grid. Dark page (required by the concept), a single hue family.

CRT treatment: the screen is a rounded-corner tube inside a moulded beige-less dark bezel with a small power LED and embossed plate "HORTICULTURAL SYSTEMS TERMINAL HST-9". Text glows (text-shadow bloom in amber), scanlines (repeating gradient overlay), a slow rolling refresh band, slight barrel curvature suggested with a vignette and inner shadow, subtle flicker and phosphor persistence on changing numbers (old value ghosts briefly). Render with DOM text in a monospace stack (Menlo/Consolas/"Courier New") sized so that exactly 80 columns by 39 rows fit the tube on desktop; on phones the layout switches to a 40-column variant with the panels paged (tabs ATMOS / POWER / WATER / BEDS / LOG, also swipeable) and the six beds stacked three by two. On wide screens the dark room around the terminal carries 412 faint tally marks scratched on the wall, one per sol, the two newest brighter.

Screen layout (panels drawn with box characters ┌─┐│└┘ and titled like [ ATMOSPHERE ]): top status line: "ARES-HORT v4.2  GREENHOUSE B  SOL 412  LMST 14:27:09" with a ticking Mars-time clock (a sol is 24 h 39 m 35 s; minutes and seconds are derived from the real clock through Coordinated Mars Time and tick in Mars seconds, with the site's hour offset chosen so a session opens in the early afternoon), dust storm index with sparkline, and link status ("EARTH LINK: 11 MIN 42 S LIGHT DELAY"). Panels: ATMOSPHERE (O2 %, CO2 ppm, pressure kPa, humidity, each with a horizontal bar made of block characters and a sparkline of ▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█); POWER (solar array output falling as dust accumulates on a row of array cells, battery bank, load and net, a tiny day curve with the current hour marked); WATER LOOP (reservoir, condensate recovery, a pipe diagram with moving characters showing flow, bed numbers lighting while irrigated); BEDS 1–6: the signature panel: each bed shows a lamp bar, its crop growing as ASCII/Unicode character art (potato vines with tubers appearing in the soil row, dwarf wheat as rising stalks of │ with ψ heads, lettuce rosettes, soy, radish with bulbs swelling in the soil, a single experimental sunflower nicknamed "GERALD" whose head turns), a soil row whose texture shows moisture, moisture %, growth stage and cultivar name; crops advance through eight growth stages over time and droop if under-watered (valve 4 sticks, so bed 4 needs manual watering) or cold; LOG: a scrolling event log in the operator's voice mixed with system messages ("14:02 BED 3 MOISTURE LOW — irrigating 40 s", "13:40 Operator note: Gerald has turned to face the lamp again. Good lad."). Below: three lines of console output, a command line with a blinking orange block cursor, and the function-key row.

Interaction: (1) Keyboard command line with real commands: HELP, STATUS, WATER <bed>, LIGHTS <0–100>, VENT, HARVEST <bed>, LOG, SCRUB (clean the solar panels with a brush sweeping the array cells and power recovering), NAME <bed> <name>, PWR (power allocation window), ACK, MUSIC (see below), plus a few unlisted words; output is typed out character by character, and HELP, STATUS, LOG and PWR open character-drawn pop-up windows over a dimmed screen. HARVEST 6 is refused: Gerald is under operator lockout. (2) Everything is also clickable/tappable: panels and beds are buttons (visible focus as inverse-video), and a row of function keys F1–F9 along the bottom (HELP / WATER / LIGHT / VENT / SCRUB / HARVEST / LOG / PWR / SND) works by touch and by the real F-keys, so the page is fully usable on a phone without a keyboard. Tapping a bed selects it; F2 and F6 act on the selection. (3) Events: a dust storm arrives every few minutes (the first about fifty seconds in): the storm index climbs, solar output drops, the console switches to power-saving (dims, sheds bed lamps one by one starting with Gerald's "ornamental" lamp just before he blooms), an alarm line flashes in orange inverse video until acknowledged; the viewer must decide in the PWR window what to keep powered (lamps, heater, pump, Earth link; life support is locked on) against a draining battery, with a brownout lock if it falls to 12 %. After the storm the array is filthy and SCRUB is needed.

Signature moment: the boot sequence and the plants. On load the tube warms up (a bright horizontal line expands to a full raster), a memory test counts, the block-letter system banner draws line by line, panels pop in one at a time with their frames drawn character by character behind an orange head (all within about three seconds, skippable with any key or tap), and then the beds' plants sprout from seed to their saved stage, sway by a character and keep growing before the viewer's eyes; HARVEST collapses a plant into a yield count with a little cascade of falling characters, and replanting starts a seedling "." that becomes "," then "ı" and so on.

Optional sound, off by default (toggle is the F-key "SND"): keyboard clicks and soft beeps. The MUSIC command plays a short square-wave tune ("Daisy Bell") only if sound is enabled. Reduced motion: no flicker, roll band, boot or typing animation, no sway or cascade; text appears immediately. Copy: laconic, technically plausible, with a human thread about the lone botanist, Dr. Imani Okoro-Lindqvist.

DESCRIPTION
A dark room, a single moulded terminal, and an amber tube that warms from a bright line into a full raster, counts its memory, draws its own banner and then builds a greenhouse dashboard frame by frame. Everything on the glass is a character in an exact 80-column grid: bars, sparklines, a plumbing diagram with arrows creeping through the pipes, a solar array that silts up cell by cell, and six planter beds whose potatoes, wheat, lettuce, soy, radishes and one sunflower called Gerald sprout, sway, droop when thirsty and ripen while you watch. The station runs itself with a dry sense of humour until a dust storm rolls in, the screen dims, an orange alarm flashes and the machine starts switching off lamps, Gerald's first; the viewer, standing in for Dr. Imani Okoro-Lindqvist on sol 412 of a solitary posting, decides what stays lit. The log alternates terse system lines with her notes, and the wall beside the terminal quietly holds 412 tally marks.

VISUAL TECHNIQUES
- Character-cell screen buffer (80x39 or 40x41) composed every frame and diffed row by row into DOM text, with non-ASCII glyphs locked to one-cell boxes so box-drawing, block and symbol characters stay on the grid
- Font size solved from the measured glyph advance so the column count always fits the tube exactly; interactive hit zones are transparent buttons laid over cell rectangles
- Phosphor bloom from layered amber text-shadows, inverse-video cells, a mid and dim intensity level, and hot orange reserved for alarms, shed loads and the cursor
- Phosphor persistence: every changed numeric cell leaves a blurred ghost of its old characters that decays over three quarters of a second
- CRT glass built in CSS: scanline overlay, slow rolling refresh band, irregular flicker, vignette and inner shadow for curvature, a corner highlight, power-save dimming, and a warm-up beam that expands from a line to the full raster
- Boot choreography on a wall-clock timeline: memory count, block-letter banner, panel frames traced character by character behind an orange drawing head
- Procedural and hand-drawn plant sprites per growth stage with per-row sway offsets, a droop transform (leaves flip, heads nod, the plant sinks), soil texture mapped to moisture, roots and tubers drawn into the soil row
- Particle cascade in character cells for the harvest, with a typed inverse-video yield tag
- Block-element data graphics: half-block bars, auto-scaled sparklines, a two-row insolation curve, dust drawn as shaded cells on the array with a sweeping brush
- Row-shift glitches and faster flicker while a storm is overhead
- Moulded bezel with turbulence grain, embossed nameplate, vent slots and a power LED that turns orange and pulses in power-save
- Seeded hand-jittered SVG tally marks on the wall, exactly 412
- Square-wave and filtered-noise sound synthesised with Web Audio, created only after the sound key is used

INTERACTION MODEL
Type at any time: keystrokes go to the command line at the bottom of the tube (Enter runs, Up/Down recall history, Esc clears), and responses type themselves out above the prompt. HELP, STATUS, LOG and PWR open pop-up windows that close with any key, Esc or a tap. Everything is also a button: the F1–F9 row (HELP, WATER, LIGHT cycle, VENT, SCRUB, HARVEST, LOG, PWR, SND) responds to click, touch and the physical function keys; tapping a bed selects it and reports its state, after which F2 waters it and F6 harvests it; tapping the atmosphere, power, water or log panel vents, opens power allocation, waters the driest bed or opens the full log. Tab moves through all of these with inverse-video focus, and in the power window the arrow keys move between loads and Enter switches them. On phones the panels become pages chosen from a tab row or by swiping, and tapping the prompt raises the keyboard. Left alone, the station keeps living: plants grow and ripen, bed 4 dries out because its valve sticks, humidity creeps up until vented, dust dims the array until scrubbed, and every few minutes a dust storm forces power-saving, flashing an alarm that is acknowledged with Enter or a tap while the viewer chooses which lamps, heater, pump and radio to keep on before the battery reaches the brownout lock. Any key or tap skips the boot; F9 turns sound on, after which keys click, events beep and MUSIC plays its one tune.