claude-minigame 🦀

Clawd Runner — the Chrome-dino game, but it's Clawd (the Claude Code crab) dodging segfault cacti and flying bugs in your terminal. Ctrl+click the crab in your Claude Code statusline and the game pops open in a new window, like the dino when the wifi dies — except your wifi is fine and you're just procrastinating.

 CLAWD RUNNER                                          HI 00536  00291
            ░▒░                      ▄▄
                                    ████          ░░░
   ▃▃▄▄▅▅▄▄▃▃▂▂▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅▅▄▄▃▃▂▂▂▂▃▃▃▃▃▃▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃
      █████████                              \o/
      █ █████ █
     ███████████              █ █                      ██
      █████████               ███                      ██
    ˙ █ █   █ █                █
▔▔▔•▔▔·▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╌▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╌▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╌▔▔▔▔▔
 SPACE jump   ↓/S duck·dive   P pause   R restart   Q quit

Zero dependencies. ~40 fps of pure-string rendering. Parallax dunes + drifting clouds, a day/night cycle with a sun, a moon and shooting stars. A square, pixel-traced Clawd with eight kinds of segfault-cactus, three flying enemies, dust kick-up, landing puffs and a death screen-shake. Procedural gaps that are always fair — and a high score.

Play

git clone https://github.com/<you>/claude-minigame
cd claude-minigame
npm link        # puts `claude-run` on your PATH
claude-run

clawd run still works as a legacy alias.

| key | action | | --- | --- | | SPACE / ↑ / W | jump | | ↓ / S | duck under mid flyers — tap in mid-air to dive (fast-fall) | | P | pause | | R | restart | | Q / ESC | quit |

Score is distance. Speed ramps up smoothly (no sudden walls), and the gap before every obstacle is sized so it's always clearable — combos and tall cacti get extra room. Enemies start flying at you around 110 — wings flapping, beating in faster than the ground scrolls — coming low (jump), mid (duck) or as a rare 5-wide bird, and they'll never stack onto a cactus so you're never asked to jump and duck at once. Night falls every 480 points, with stars and the odd shooting star. Jumps have a landing-buffer so a slightly-early press still hops. That's it, that's the game.

Make Clawd clickable in Claude Code

This is the whole point, so here's how the trick works: modern terminals (Windows Terminal, iTerm2, kitty, WezTerm…) support OSC 8 hyperlinks — escape sequences that turn any printed text into a ctrl+clickable link. Links don't have to be https://: they can be any registered URL scheme. So:

1. Register the clawd:// protocol so your OS knows clicking it launches the game.

   Windows (no admin needed, writes only HKCU):

   powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools\install-protocol.ps1

   Test it: start clawd://play → the game opens in a new terminal window.

   macOS/Linux: not wired up yet — PRs very welcome (duti/Info.plist on macOS, xdg-mime + a .desktop file on Linux).

2. Put a linked crab in your Claude Code statusline.

   No statusline yet? Point ~/.claude/settings.json at the one included here:

   "statusLine": { "type": "command", "command": "node <ABS PATH>/tools/statusline-basic.js" }

   Already have one? Splice these three lines into it:

   const ORANGE = '\x1b[38;2;217;119;87m', DIM = '\x1b[2m', RESET = '\x1b[0m';
   const link = (t, u) => '\x1b]8;;' + u + '\x07' + t + '\x1b]8;;\x07';
   out += '  ' + link(ORANGE + '▐▛▜▌' + RESET + DIM + ' play' + RESET, 'clawd://play');

3. Ctrl+click the ▐▛▜▌ play at the bottom of any Claude Code session. Your terminal may ask permission to open an external app the first time — that's the OS being sensible about custom protocols. Allow it, and Clawd scuttles.

Why not the actual welcome-screen mascot?

We tried. As of 2026, Claude Code ships as a compiled binary on every install path — the native installer and the npm package both deliver a platform executable, so there's no cli.js to politely wrap a hyperlink around anymore. Patching the sprite inside a 244 MB binary means proper executable repacking (see how tweakcc does it with node-lief — that's the prior art if you want to attempt it). The statusline is the officially supported, update-proof surface, and it has a bonus: the crab is clickable all session long, not just at startup.

Uninstall

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools\install-protocol.ps1 -Uninstall
npm unlink -g claude-minigame

…and remove the crab lines from your statusline. High scores live in ~/.claude-minigame.json if you want to scrub the evidence.

Development

npm test                 # headless engine tests (physics, collisions, rendering)
npm run snapshot         # render bot-played frames as plain text (debugging/CI)
node bin/clawd.js run --seed 7   # deterministic runs

The engine (src/engine.js) is pure simulation — no terminal I/O — so it's easy to test and easy to port. bin/clawd.js owns the screen and keyboard.

Credits

Clawd is the unofficial mascot of Claude Code, by Anthropic. This is a fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic — the sprite is a hand-made block-character homage. Inspired by Chrome's chrome://dino, the patron saint of lost connectivity.

MIT, see LICENSE. Vibecoded with Claude Code, naturally.