Nightmare is the only style in this app that does not draw a single Japanese character.
Not mirrored katakana. Not the kanji. Not a numeral or a piece of punctuation from any of the other families.
Twenty seven Gothic letters, from a fourth-century alphabet.
Two readings, and this app does not pick one
Upstream calls this the Merovingian's heyday. The comment in this app's own source calls it Matrix version 2.0, the Architect's redesign, the one where entire crops were lost.
Both are interpretations. Neither is a scene anyone filmed, and the Styles section does not claim otherwise. What is documented is the alphabet: upstream took the Gothic script from the Codex Argenteus, a sixth-century manuscript, and that choice is the reason this style reads as older and more wrong than the rest.
Matrix Desktop rebuilt those letters from Noto Sans Gothic rather than the Silubur font upstream used. The Unicode range is public; the outlines are not shared.
A very high high-pass, and the fastest fall
Two things make this style behave unlike anything else here.
The high pass sits at 0.70, the highest in the app, so only the brightest cells bloom at all and the rest stay hard and flat.
Fall speed is 1.20 against the default 0.30. Nothing else in the app comes close.
Earlier releases slanted the field 22.5 degrees and swept an animated thunder flash across it. 1.5.1 removed both, along with every other per-style effect. The identity now rests on the alphabet, the palette and the numbers below.
The numbers, if you want to check them
| Setting | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Rain model | layered | Three depth planes |
| Columns | 60 | Grid width |
| Fall speed | 1.20 | Four times the default 0.30 |
| Animation speed | 0.375 | Pulled down to keep the fast fall readable |
| High pass | 0.70 | Highest in the app. Only the brightest cells bloom |
| Cycle speed | 0.06 | Fastest mutation in the app |
| Trail decay | 0.75 | Trails clear quickly |
| Raindrop length | 0.50 | Short trails |
| Cursor isolation | off | No separate cursor color channel |
The palette
Five stops running black through two reds into amber and white. It is the only style in the app with no green in it at all.
The glyph file
The 27 Gothic code points come from the Unicode Character Database. Every outline comes from Noto Sans Gothic under the SIL Open Font License, and none from the earlier Silubur-based artwork.
Slices 27
Bytes 442,368
SHA-256 bd03100eabb20f0996face99307c041f6b7cb3670c01fd1613b68a6e5585cf51
Source font Noto Sans Gothic v2.001, SIL OFL 1.1, pinned by hash
Code points U+10330 to U+1034A, from the Unicode Character Database
Rebuild swift scripts/generate-nightmare-gothic-coverage.swift
On your display
This style renders natively at 3840 by 2160 and 5120 by 2880. The glyph atlas picks its mip level from the real backing scale, so characters stay sharp on a 5K panel instead of going soft.
Refresh rate is handled separately from simulation rate. The rain advances on its own fixed schedule and the shader interpolates between the current state and the previous one at presentation time, so a 120 Hz display gets 120 smooth frames without the rain running faster. On battery or under thermal pressure the app drops to 30 or 15 fps and turns bloom off.
Common questions
What is the Nightmare Matrix?
Upstream describes it as how the Matrix may have appeared in the Merovingian's heyday. This app's own source comments read it as Matrix version 2.0, the Architect's failed redesign. Both are interpretations; neither is a scene from the films.
Why does Nightmare use Gothic letters instead of katakana?
The upstream project chose the Gothic script of the Codex Argenteus to make the rain read as older and stranger. Matrix Desktop keeps the alphabet and rebuilds the outlines from Noto Sans Gothic rather than reusing upstream's font.
What does Reduce Motion do to Nightmare?
It slows the rain to five row advances per second. The palette, the high pass and the Gothic letters do not change; since 1.5.1 there is no separate animated effect to switch off.
Twenty seven letters
Every other style in this app is built from an alphabet somebody scanned out of a Japanese cookbook.
This one is built from a sixth-century Bible.