Community dictionary

Many terms, references, and in-jokes have been made by the pxls.space community over its lifespan.

Site Mechanics

Canvas reset

A canvas reset is a mechanic of pxls.space in which the current canvas changes to a new one. These usually take around 30 minutes. A canvas resets once the canvas is deemed “full” by the Pxls staff (usually around a month). Resets get announced 3 days in advance in the Pxls Discord server and in the notifications tab on the site.

Chat

The Pxls chat was added on August 1st 2019 and functions as a way for users to coordinate on the canvas without needing to use the Pxls Discord server.

It also has some additional functionality, such as:

• When you paste a template url it automatically converts it to a simplified version
• The amount of pixels you've placed (rounded) is displayed next to your name
• A faction that you are in can be displayed next to your name if you click the Set Displayed button next to a faction in your profile
• You can change your name color to any of the palette colors, as well as some custom gradients if you've made a donation to Pxls.

Cooldown event

The Pxls developers may sometimes temporarily lower the cooldown between getting pixels as a fun small event, or to make up for lost time if the site went down unexpectedly.

-snip- mode

-snip- mode is a canvas mode that effects user's usernames, changing them all temporarily to '-snip-' instead of their usual username. This effectively makes each user anonymous. -snip- mode does not affect the color, faction or tag of the user's username. -snip- mode has only been used on a few gimmick canvases, those being canvases 13b, 21a, 34a, 43a, 60a, 78a, 88a, 98a, and accidentally on 67a due to lookups being broken.

The reason -snip- mode was created was to hide users' IP's since they would've been shown instead of usernames due to the pxls.space server being migrated to a different computer. Since then it has been just been used as a gimmick on some gimmick canvases.

Template

A template is an image displayed on top of the canvas to make it easier for a user to create an art piece.

Information on how to create a template can be found here.

Template styles

There are several different "styles" that templates can be displayed with. Pictured below are a few of the most commonly used. For a list of all the template styles, see List of styles.

In common conversation, most users refer to the second and third styles as "dotted" and "symbols" respectively.

The terms on the top for each are used in the template settings on the website, while the terms on the bottom are used by Clueless when using its /template command.

Undo

After placing a pixel, a large undo button will appear at the bottom of the screen allowing you to undo your pixel in case you misplaced it, or are devirgining. This button will disappear after around five seconds. Alternatively, the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Z will also undo a pixel whenever the undo button is visible.

Every user has three undos available a minute. When a pixel is undone, a sixty second timer begins that will restock your undos once finished. This means that you are able to undo a pixel, then (for example) do two more undos after waiting fifty seconds, and your undos will restock ten seconds after that instead of forcing you to wait a full minute every time an undo is performed.

Site Interaction

Faction

See Faction.

Griefing

Griefing is the act of intentionally placing pixels over another user or faction's art on the canvas to be malicious, for fun, or for revenge.

Things on a Canvas

Background

A background is often used an infill between art pieces, but may sometimes have its own area on a canvas. The most common type of background is a lattice.

• 
  The Chromatic Empire's wavy rainbow pattern on canvas 70.
• 
  Pxls Roads' road on canvas 37 showcasing different road variants to match the lattices around it. (In the top left and top right.)

Critters

Critters are very small art pieces that can be built many times all over the canvas, usually standing on top of other larger art pieces. These include, but are not limited to:

• Amogi/Crewmates
• Chimkens
• Cirnos
• Ponks
• Scugs/Slugcats
• Tutels

• 
  An art piece on r/place 2022 with many amogi inside it.
• 
  Many chimkens around a large chimken on canvas 87.
• 
  Many mini cirnos on canvas 81.
• 
  Several ponks on canvas 87.
• 
  Several scugs on canvas 91.
• 
  Many tutels on Sinder's canvas.

Ego

An ego is a number built on the canvas by a user displaying the amount of all-time pixels they have placed. These can vary in size, but tend to be small due to an ego being a solo project.

• 
  MonsterChicken's ego, with the user's name to denote who's ego it is.
• 
  dankgod's (now VZ) ego, the 0.XXm is sometimes used a stylistic choice to put emphasis on how close a user is to 1 million pixels.
• 
  SubaruSenpai's ego, with proximity to their art to denote who's ego it is.
• 
  TheWaffleLord's ego, with an art piece referencing their username to denote who's ego it is.

Lattice

A lattice is a type of background characterized by repeating patterns.

• 
  Green Lattice on canvas 58, with an art piece to expand outwards from.
• 
  Cell Lattice on canvas 47, showcasing the many different variants of cells made by various users on the canvas.
• 
  The "Lattice Lattice" project made by Chalkless on canvas 31 made up of many different lattices and backgrounds.

Pixel farm

A pixel farm is a small area on the canvas, usually built shortly before a canvas reset, where many users place pixels randomly, in patterns, or create small art pieces like critters to get their pixel count up due to the art/lattice they were building being complete.

A pixel farm made on canvas 91 with a unique art piece above it indicating that it is a pixel farm.

Terminology

<1ker

A term used, often condescendingly, to refer to users who have placed less than 1,000 all-time pixels.

"Fiddle" related terms

"Fiddle abuse" is used to refer to "fiddled" projects that have excessive/bad dithering, anti-aliasing, and/or bad palette conversion. The term originates from the now-deprecated pxlsFiddle, which was originally used as a tool for such conversions.

The term "defiddling" is the act of manually cleaning up an art piece using a photo editing software by removing any out of place pixels generated by whatever method was used to either downscale the image or convert it to the Pxls palette. A guide on how best to defiddle art can be found here.

• 
  An example of poor anti-aliasing where a piece of art was downscaled causing it to have a "blurry" look.
• 
  An example of a piece of art being downscaled and given a "dithered" effect, causing it to have a "crunchy" look.
• 
  An example of a picture of someone that had its colors automatically converted to the Pxls palette causing it to lose most of its detail.
• 
  A "fiddled" art piece that was automatically converted to the Pxls palette.
• 
  The "defiddled" version of that art piece that was manually cleaned up by the user Latency for the osuplace faction.

"Virgin" related terms

"Virgin" pixels are pixels that no user has placed on. "Devirgining" is the act of placing pixels over virgin pixels to devirgin them.

"Virgin abuse" is when an art piece or lattice shares many colors with the initial canvas, meaning only a fraction of the art/lattice has to be built.
Excessive virgin abuse (around 10% or more) is seen by many as an unfair advantage, and failing to devirgin excessively virgin abused art/lattice may result in other users devirgining it or even attacking.

Users have the ability to view the "virginmap" by enabling it in the settings (or pressing the X key) which shows which pixels are still virgin pixels. Virgin pixels appear light green, while non-virgin pixels appear black.

There is a setting Pxls developers can enable that causes pixels placed on non-virgin pixels to make the pixel refresh cooldown longer (1.6x by default). This setting has not been enabled since Canvas 18.

• 
  Green Lattice's territory during the middle of canvas 72.
• 
  The virginmap of the area showing only the green pixels of the lattice were placed, letting Green Lattice claim a large area very quickly (virgin abusing).

Preclaim

A preclaim is an image made shortly before a canvas reset that is repeatedly altered by different users to show where they or their faction plans to place their art on the following canvas.

An interactive list of all the final preclaim images can be found here.

c81's preclaim image, originally an art piece made by Lyra.

Community Creations

Clueless

See Clueless.

Miscellaneous

Annie

Annie is a character/inside joke created by Pxls staff. She was mentioned in the canvas announcements for C34, C34a, C36, and C98a.

The story goes that canvas 34 (a teddy bear) was given to the community by Annie to be colored. Canvas 34 was stopped midway through for the gimmick canvas 34a, which had the design of a few viruses. The "lore" reason for the surprise gimmick canvas was that Annie was taking a COVID-19 test and the teddy bear was quarantined. Annie was mentioned in the announcement for the ending of canvas 36 (a slice of cheese) stating "yall took Annie's cheese smh, what is she going to take to the picnic on the beach now."

The Annie story was brought back for canvas 98a, which was a smaller version of canvas 36 with only the holes in the cheese placeable. The "lore" reason was Annie doesn't actually like Swiss cheese and the community had to fill the holes on the second slice to make up for stealing the first.

These were some of the only times "lore" was added to the canvases, the other notable time being the "accidents" on canvas 67a.

Bag

A bag is a small sprite brought to Pxls by Bezimienny and shadow_z_az. It comes from the game "Knights of Pen And Paper 2" and is intended to be a guinea pig. However, this fact isn't immediately obvious, so users on Pxls began theorizing what it could be (including but not limited to: a kangaroo, a rat, a bag, a fetus, a potato.) People also used the bag emotes to express various different emotions. Quickly, people started adding stuff on to "bags" or creating a new bag entirely. The naming convention for bags is "thiscanmeananythingbut-x."

Over the course of time two separate bag factions have been created: Bag Faction created by Bezimienny and shadow_z_az, and Bag Nation created by Mr. Sneke and House-5.

Canvas 43a depicts a large bag as the placeable area of the canvas.

A list of all the variants that have been made of the bag can be found in the #bags channel in the Bag Nation Discord server.

The original bag sprite

Happy new year

This phrase is usually said in Pxls chat by a few users at the top of every hour. It started as a joke by Pxls user fisk during New Year's at the end of 2023 with them continuing to say "Happy new year" long after the new year had started. Some other Pxls users noticed and joined in wishing a happy new year, with others noticing them and joining as well leading to the phrase being as widely used as it is today.

The phrase eventually grew so popular, an entire faction was made that builds new year themed art on the canvas.

:welldone:

See Steven the Cat.